fic: one over

[ittnse]

one over
tags: kaveh/alhaitham, kaveh, alhaitham kaveh's mother, traveler cameos, tighnari and cyno cameos, canon compliant, one shot, past relationship(s), drinking, canon-typical drinking, not beta read, character study, kaveh is a mess, alhaitham is alhaitham, unreliable narrator, kaveh's homemaking: the fic
status: 21378w, completed, ao3 link
summary:

In the morning Alhaitham says, you're up early, which is clearly a veiled attempt at commenting on Kaveh's habit of sleeping in after pulling an all-nighter to accommodate a client's demands and then very narrowly getting up just in time to deliver the blueprints, half-awake and awkwardly rumpled in a way that might have been attractive when he was newly twenty and his body was still youthful enough to get away with odd hours and a haphazard diet. As he is now, it just makes him look like a particularly haggard fungi, or so Tighnari's told him, but it's a habit that he's found hard to break, even though he keeps on telling himself he will, because he's certainly not getting any younger. The various aches and pains in his body are proof enough of that.

Kaveh loves the things that can't forgive him, because that's at least a love he can understand.

one over

In the morning Alhaitham says, you're up early, which is clearly a veiled attempt at commenting on Kaveh's habit of sleeping in after pulling an all-nighter to accommodate a client's demands and then very narrowly getting up just in time to deliver the blueprints, half-awake and awkwardly rumpled in a way that might have been attractive when he was newly twenty and his body was still youthful enough to get away with odd hours and a haphazard diet. As he is now, it just makes him look like a particularly haggard fungi, or so Tighnari's told him, but it's a habit that he's found hard to break, even though he keeps on telling himself he will, because he's certainly not getting any younger. The various aches and pains in his body are proof enough of that.

But it doesn't bother him. He's in a particularly good mood today, and even the struggle of tugging his gloves up his elbows until they lie flat and crease-free doesn't bother him as much as it normally would, although the smudged fingerprint on the window nearest to the doorway where Alhaitham must have leaned his weight against as he bent down to retrieve something or the other does, and he clips his hair up behind his ears with the blind certainty of someone who'd done the same thing in their years at the Akademiya staring at the back of his head in an angled mirror (which he'd had to build by hand, cutting the glass painstakingly and fitting it into the frames until he was satisfied with the view he'd constructed of himself), and then had done it so many times that they no longer had to look. His fingers deftly weave the next one in as he uses his hand to pluck the last one from between his lips, grabbing Mehrak once he's done, and he sweeps into the kitchen to pluck a sunsettia off of their fruit plate.

He's been meaning to replace it: it's this old, dusty piece that he'd made when he was younger, one of his first handmade ceramics. He'll still hold onto it, of course; Kaveh has a habit of sentimentality, most of all with the things that he's crafted, but it's not something that needs to be put on display in the middle of the room — he has much better taste and technique now, and besides it still has a chip on it from the side from when he'd accidentally knocked it into the side of the cabinets.

"Aren't you going to forgetting to move that?" says Alhaitham, who graciously deigns to look up from the book he's reading in the corner of the kitchen, and then looks over and down, his stare judgmentally falling upon the scrap-littered ground where Kaveh had been working with the saw yesterday, worked into a fit of artistic inspiration. Kaveh had only come back from a business trip two days ago, his luggage filled with wood samples and haphazardly scrawled notes, and he'd spent the first day sleeping, dead to the world, and the second day he'd jolted awake with such alarm that Alhaitham had dropped something in his room — audibly — when Kaveh had sprung to his feet loudly and dragged himself to his workbench, worked into a fit of sudden panic at the looming deadline of one of his other projects, and he'd worked on that design until his fingers were smudged with lines that'd fallen on his palms instead of the paper he'd meant it to. And then, conceding defeat at last, and only reluctantly satisfied with the result of his efforts, he'd gone and unpacked all of his luggage, dropping massive pieces of wood into their living room, and gone for his tools to distract himself.

His former teachers always told them to never work with their hands when they were sleep-deprived, or hadn't eaten, or were otherwise removed from the prime of their health. It was always a moot point: the Akademiya, populated solely by scholars who cared more about their research then they did themselves, was exactly the type of place where the practical common-sense understanding to not work with dangerous and sharp-edged objects went ignored in favor of the pursuit of enlightenment. Most of Kaveh's best work — or most well-acclaimed work — has been made when he was sleep-deprived in an only moderately instead of well-lit room, relying on muscle memory to guide his hands away before he cut into himself. It's been a point of contention between him and Alhaitham for as long as he can remember, Alhaitham being unmoved by Kaveh pointing out that it's something that everyone does, not just him, and that also Kaveh has never been hurt doing it before. He's particularly fond of pointing out that just "taking his chances" is not something that he'd expect Kaveh to find advisable, considering his well-known streak of bad luck in most everything else.

He's never been able to explain it to Alhaitham the way he feels it. Alhaitham sleeps soundly, the proper way: he keeps his back flat on the bed, his arms don't sprawl gracelessly away from his body, and he doesn't roll around, which had been a problem for Kaveh when he was younger; if he dreams now, after the Akademiya's plans have been thwarted, he shows no trace of it. But Kaveh, even before he dreamed, or even after he remembers dreaming as a child, sleeps restlessly. In that darkened, mindless slumber, he can sense it: the heft of earth running down his fingers, the clink of stone, the sound of a shovel breaking earth, the sound of wood slotting perfectly where it's meant to be. The weight of the saw dragging his palm down. The heft of the whetting knife against his knuckles. It's not dreaming: he knows this.

Not dreaming, only — I could do this in my sleep, his classmates at the Akademiya had complained, reviewing the work of their juniors in the underclassmen's hallway; Kaveh, peering into the open door of the woodshop, had thought: I really, really could.

"I'll clean the rest of it up after I come back," says Kaveh defensively, but he's already turned to that side of the room, taking a few steps closer to examine it more closely. The shelves he'd fixed are here, too: they were a set that must have been pre-installed before Alhaitham bought the house from the previous owner, because they weren't out of Alhaitham's reach but just slightly too low and protruded too much the wall for Alhaitham to have bought them himself. Whenever Alhaitham had passed by that side of the room, he had to duck his head slightly so he wouldn't clip his head on the edge, and they were made from a cheap cut of wood that had a particularly unflattering color besides instead of possessing any other redeeming quality.

Alhaitham keeps the ugly decorations he keeps on buying on those shelves, and Kaveh suspects that it's because he knows that Kaveh keeps looking at them with the faint discontent of seeing a singular brick off-color in an otherwise perfectly uniform street, or windows that aren't perfectly aligned but have one raised slightly higher than the other despite being set in the same wall: a nagging discomfort not easily ignored. In the new shape that Kaveh's fashioned them into, the decorations won't fit, which Kaveh has not yet mentioned to Alhaitham in an effort to hide this from him for as long as possible for fear of Alhaitham looking for a new place to display his awful taste even more visibly. He'd only mentioned that he had taken them down because of how ugly they were, which was true; they didn't even match the rest of the wood tones in the house, so he'd had to stain it to match.

He glances at the clock despite himself. There is time to spare, he admits to himself, so it's only with minimal grumbling and muttering — Alhaitham's one to talk about people not cleaning up their messes, considering that he's been known to leave his things strewn across the tabletops collecting dust until Kaveh comes to confront him about it — that he calls Mehrak over and starts to mount the shelves on the wall.

Just as he finishes, Alhaitham says: "It's crooked."

"They are not," says Kaveh on reflex: takes a step back, scrutinizes it. The shelves are, indeed, crooked. His eyebrow twitches. "And you didn't tell me before?!"

"I hadn't noticed then," says Alhaitham. He takes another sip from his drink, casual as anything, and flips to the next part of his book, frowning slightly; he has to readjust his hold on it as he thumbs over the page, the liquid in the cup nearly spilling all over the floor. He could just set it down — Kaveh's told him as much before — but Alhaitham is not to be deterred. It was one of the things that Kaveh had used to find charming when they were little: his dogged insistence on reading, more bookish than even most of the Akademiya; the idea of a much smaller Alhaitham smuggling books into his bed and reading in the dim light had made him smile when he'd first thought of it. "Don't you have a meeting?"

Kaveh does, indeed, have a meeting. He's not late, exactly, and he could even arrive on time if he left right now, though he still hasn't dusted off and moved the piece that he'd made last night yet: it's still in the middle of the room, undisturbed, even though the room overall looks significantly neater now that he's moved the shelves. Kaveh pushes it slightly to the side, his Dendro vision clinking against his hip as he moves, and pats his head hurriedly to try to smooth any stray hairs back into place.

"Don't touch anything," Kaveh warns, grabbing his folder off of the side table. "And don't move anything, either!"

"It is my house," Alhaitham points out, the same way he always does.

"I mean it, Alhaitham!" says Kaveh, scowling at him as he passes him by. His keys fit snugly against his palm when he snags them off of their new hooks, and he fumbles with the door with one hand, pointing at Alhaitham with the other. 

"Not going to eat else anything before you go?" Alhaitham says, pointedly conciliatory, like he doesn't know that Kaveh doesn't have the time to eat something before he goes, or at least not now: all because of Alhaitham's urging, might he add! If he hadn't had to point out the mess in their living room, Kaveh might have had been able to grab more than a sunsettia before he had to go to work.

Kaveh's cape flares out behind him as he valiantly tries to maintain the good mood he'd woken up by not responding to Alhaitham's provocations. "Mehrak, we're going!"

Alhaitham hums in response, unbothered. The door swings shut. Underneath the sound of it softly falling back into place, he can almost hear the sound of a page turning.










He isn't worried about this meeting, which was probably the first sign that something would go wrong. But to his credit, there wasn't anything to be worried about; the client had already made it clear that she loved the sketch and was more than fine going forward with it, which had made it one of the very few of Kaveh's pieces that had been approved on the first try, so all he'd had to do was finalize the blueprint and submit it during this meeting, and then the first stage of negotiations would be done. But he's sitting in front of her, now, the smile on his face frozen — she'd interrupted him when he was talking about the design — as she sets her cup down and says, "I'm afraid I can't go forward with this."

Kaveh says, incredulous: "Are you backing out of the contract?"

"No, no," she says, waving her hand. "You're misunderstanding me. It's the design, you see; upon further reflection, it isn't going to work with the vision that I had in mind. It is to my specifications, of course, but I thought about it, and I am paying you a premium as my architect, aren't I, as the Light of Kshahrewar? I was hoping that you could come up with something… nicer."

"You accepted it yesterday," says Kaveh, too-honest with his disbelief, and her eyes narrow minutely in displeasure. So he backtracks: "Is there a reason you don't want to accept it?"

"Sometimes there isn't a reason," she says, surprised: as if she had thought Kaveh could understand. As if she'd thought Kaveh would understand. Her nails click against the surface of the table as she drums her fingers against it, resting the weight of her chin in her other hand; her eyes dark and rimmed with a subtle, red-tinted purple, the sweep of her lashes lazily curious, the type of interest that only exists when there's nothing else to hold it. "A sense of beauty can't be reasoned with. Isn't that why the former Akademiya sought to ban art?"

And Kaveh thinks: that's not true, because there's always a reason, though that hadn't been something that the Akademiya had necessarily understood either. There's always a reason. People like to ascribe this part of Kaveh to Alhaitham's influence: the belief that all things are rational, or at least have a relationship with rationality. The source is very different, although a very Alhaitham-esque voice in his mind points out that it's ironic that Kaveh resists the idea of his belief that all viewpoints have roots in something else came from outside influence. Kaveh makes a living on discerning the methodology behind making things appealing, coaxing out the simplified truth that they themselves can't define about why they like the things they like: like his juniors coming to him and saying, I don't understand, and Kaveh saying, What don't you understand? I'll help you, and they'd said everything, I don't understand any of it, but of course they'd gotten some of it, they just didn't know which parts.

He'd helped them find what was blocking their understanding back then, just like how he helps people understand what hampers their understanding of beauty now.

"I don't want to argue with you," he says, instead, which is a precursor to nearly every argument he's had in his life. His fingers fold over each other, firmly pressing into the empty grooves in the skin between the bones of the hand, and he tries to smile even though he can feel his face protesting: you wear your heart on your sleeve, Cyno had told him before. "I'm just trying to understand what you're dissatisfied with. Is there any particular part that you want me to revise?"

"If I had to say…" her gaze wanders out of the window, then comes back to Kaveh. "I suppose I'd say everything."

So they end up arguing, because of course they do. Kaveh's smile becomes more and more strained until it snaps off entirely, and he slaps his hand against the edge of the table, nearly upsetting their drinks, the full plates quivering with the sudden force. She crosses her arms, snapping back at him acerbically, and Mehrak whirs to their side as Kaveh's voice raises, gesturing at the blueprint. The waiter observes them both warily from behind the counter. Kaveh's nails dig into his palms.

Then the client sighs heavily. It could be her relenting: Kaveh freezes mid-sentence, a sort of expectation budding inside of his chest. But she looks around at the quiet cafe, which is slightly more empty than it had been when he'd come in, and then turns back to him.

"Can we please not do this today?" she says, pinching her nose, and in that moment, Kaveh is oddly struck by how much she looks like how he remembers his mother: her long, blonde hair, the slope of her exhausted features, the way that she looks at him steadily, unflinching. "I don't know what the problem is. I respect your work as an architect, which is why I'm asking you to revise it. It shouldn't be too hard for you, should it?"

And Kaveh, without thinking about it: "Alright."











And later, he thinks: well, it's fine, she must have been feeling upset, that's all; god knows that people can get unreasonable when they're upset. Kaveh can get unreasonable when he's upset. He's enough of an adult to admit that. Why should he be bothered? He's been doing this for so long; it shouldn't bother him when a client has unreasonable demands. He'll just go back to the drawing board and do it again, all of it, without thinking too much about it. He's done it for her once, so he could do it for her twice: figure out what she wants when she's unable to put it into words. It's what he's good at, and what they pay him to do, and it's a language that Kaveh has always understood better than Alhaitham no matter how many courses Alhaitham takes on semiotics or linguistics or runes.

But it nags at him. He unfolds his sketch and stares at it in the warmth of Lambad's tavern, moodily observing it through the edge of his goblet, and then the warped green edge of a bottle of Lambad's wine, and then in the flickering golden light of the fire of the ovens throwing shadows onto the lines as the sunlight outside dies, and then at last in the sloping moonlight as he rolls it up and puts it in its tube again, clumsy fingers struggling to fit it in, and it nearly creases in his frustration before he manages to cram it in and tuck it away into Mehrak. He pulls his toolbox closer to him and rests his flushed face against the cool metal. He closes his eyes, thinking.

Lambad says something to his employees in the background in a low voice, and Kaveh thinks absently it must be about him, because there aren't any other patrons in the tavern now, but he doesn't get to think of it for long, because someone's putting his arm over their shoulder and pulling him up despite his protests. They help him out as Kaveh mumbles something about his tab, and then there's a pause and another conversation over his shoulder, and then he's hit with the cool night air, and helped to a bench, and then people are talking about him a third time, he's certain, though he can't make out the words.

In the Akademiya, there had been a professor who had once remarked to a different lecturer that Kaveh must have had a perfect visualization of what he wanted to create in his mind, drawing like he did. It wasn't something that Kaveh was meant to hear, and he hadn't eavesdropped intentionally — he wasn't Alhaitham — but he'd heard it all the same. He had been going back into the classroom, intending to search for something of his he'd left behind, but he'd been drawn to her voice instead, and he'd known it wasn't true.

Kaveh has an excellent understanding of physical space and distance. He can gauge distances just by looking at them far better than the vast majority of graduates from his darshan, which he knows from drunken bets when they'd still been close enough — fresh out of graduation — to go drinking together, still flushed with young optimism that they'd be able to make successful careers out of their studies, convinced of their own genius. His eyes are technically capable of distinguishing between shades of color more sensitively than most others', even among those of his age and younger, and he has a near-perfect material catalogue of Sumerian materials and their properties, and he is good at visualizing.

But what he wants to create, he can't see: he can only see what he creates. The sharp, sudden flashes of artistry that filter through his mind have color and shape that he can't describe in their absence, only materialize in the fleeting afterimage of their conception that he draws out himself; these he derives from himself, his experience, determined to chase that — inspiration? Enlightenment? Neither seems accurate.

What he seeks is something awfully, terribly common, which (unlike the Akademiyan connotation of these words) isn't a condemnation of them at all: it's just beauty, something which even the smallest of Sumeru's children is well-acquainted with, and all he does is chase after it, looking for ways to convince others to see what he sees, to develop the empathy of the eyes, and then the soul; isn't it lovely? Assembling the foundation like cutting up a fruit: revealing the soft flesh of it as to be made palatable, then digested, and awaiting the pleasure of the tongue, the sweetest thing words can say, likening mind to mind: it's lovely.

And Kaveh's mind is very good at hanging onto what he understands, even when he doesn't want it to. That, more than anything, is what contributes to his "genius": the foundation of all knowledge, which is memory, the only equal to comprehension. As he leans against the bench, his hair brushing against his exposed neck, the pattern of the stars still etched onto the back of his eyelids with aching clarity, he thinks about it: how the light had poured over her features, highlighting the wrinkles at the edge of her face as she'd leaned back in her chair, and how he'd been leaning across the table, over the papers, his ink-smudged hands gesticulating as he'd tried to convince her. How that angle made him shorter than her, sitting, at about the height that he'd been when he was teenaged, or about there, and how it'd reminded him of being there — standing by his mother's side — as she looked away and sighed, and how he understood, instinctually, that it was because of him. That his mother, who lived and worked and saw as he did, even through the very same red eyes, who rung out a sense of beauty — a sensible beauty — a beauty that could be understood and contextualized and replicated and admired — from the endless world around her found him difficult to love, or at least difficult for her, though she would have never admitted it, which doesn't make it less of the truth: Kaveh is intimately acquainted with how lack of admission doesn't preclude the possibility of honesty.

The point is this: Kaveh knows what he cannot accept, is that he'd stopped today and not pushed the point not because he agreed with her assessment or didn't mind going through another round of grueling revisions, but because he'd looked at her, and she'd reminded him of his mother, and that bothers him — like an itch he can't scratch — because he's thirty, now, and closer to her age than he'd ever thought about before, and it still rattles him. It's the ghost of a building that should be torn down sitting in the lot where he's supposed to erect the next. It's the sound of his past classmates calling him the Light of Kshahrewar as he turns the corner, trying to look like he's not avoiding them, and the people asking him how he constructed the Palace of Alcazarzaray and what he was thinking at the time.

Isn't it embarrassing to define yourself by how gifted you'd been when you were in the Akademiya when we've graduated for over a decade? Alhaitham had asked a peer once coolly when they'd bumped into him over drinks, after they'd been talking about their school years — or rather, the other man was talking about his school years, and how he'd had better grades in Kaveh in their foundational courses when they were students. He'd kicked Alhaitham under the table, but it's something that haunts him: does Kaveh, as he is now, have anything to be proud of, to admire that he's striving towards?

The designs that he's drawn are nice but not technically excellent: beautiful, but not exquisite, the visual appeal declawed by the considerations of ordinary people: the cost, the amount of workers available for construction, the practicality of transporting the necessary designs, the timeframe, the properties of the land itself, the weather, the commissioner's personal preferences. He can clearly hear how Alhaitham would say it's enough to make his customers satisfied, and remind him that his pockets remain empty because he can't accept what he's given, and Kaveh, haven't you ever thought that the reason you remain so continually unsatisfied is your arrogance in believing you know what people want better than they know it themselves?

He can clearly hear Alhaitham— "Kaveh. Kaveh."

Kaveh's eyes squint upward unwillingly. In front of him he can see Alhaitham above him, faintly blurry, and he blinks to clear his vision, but it doesn't help. It's then that he realizes the blurriness is because he's listing slightly forward, so he lurches back to correct it, but that just makes a sudden wave of nausea rock through him. A hand comes up to steady him before he can do it himself, almost-foreign fingers cold against the bare skin of his back, the palm marginally warmer where it rests against the pale fabric of his shirt, and the slope of Alhaitham's unforgiving features is familiar, and it makes his heart ache the same way that his client's had, too, except it doesn't make him want to give in, not the way that hers had. Alhaitham is the one thing that Kaveh doesn't give into, or at least not in a way that matters. They'd both learned how true that rang a long, long time ago: when they had that argument, which is not something that Kaveh particularly likes to recall but can't help recalling anyways, just like he recalls the color of his mother's hair or the notes that he'd made in that book from the House of Daena that he'd lost and then had to pay for when he'd never found it, or the red flesh of Alhaitham's eyes, that outer corner that traced the edge of his bottom lashes.

"Alhaitham," says Kaveh, or at least tries to say. He reaches out blindly and catches him on Mehrak, which flies to his side, his arm supported at the elbow by something else soft and warm. Mehrak stays there obediently until Kaveh can get up and stand properly even if he does feel woozy. No amount of blinking is going to make him feel less like he's about to tip over at any moment, but he does feel like it's important to stand by himself: enormously important in a way that eclipses everything else from the soft ache of his body, exhausted by something more than just the physical, and the throbbing beginnings of a days-long migraine, and the faintly damp edge of his eyes. He lets go of Mehrak, waving it away, and presses his palm against his temple, which is faintly tacky from his own sweat. He feels very warm.

There's whirring in the background. Something crinkles. Kaveh's mind feels like it's too big for his skull, and he tries to hold very still, even as he can hear Alhaitham — and it must be Alhaitham, he thinks with a certainty that he could verify later if he cared with various pieces of evidence, like the sound of jingling keys, Kaveh's ears having memorized that specific ring and its music, and those footsteps, damnably soft when their owner wanted them to be, and the way that he smelled, books and ink and the wash that Kaveh borrowed when he ran out of his that Alhaitham bought from the same market from the same seller that he had when they were in the Akademiya — taking something in hand, and Alhaitham's silence, which is the most recognizable thing of all.

It's not that Alhaitham doesn't talk to him. If anything, Alhaitham talks to Kaveh too much, and they always end up disagreeing, and Kaveh sometimes bitterly thinks that it'd be better if they didn't talk at all. After all, hadn't they been silent whenever they met each other for that interminable stretch of time? But Alhaitham's silences have a sound to them that Kaveh knows, even if Alhaitham doesn't know what they sound like, because he's always trying to elicit them: can't you be quiet? He's asked Alhaitham more times than he can count. Do you really have to comment on everything that I do?

But it isn't that he wants Alhaitham to say nothing to him, necessarily, so much as what he wants it to verify, even though the verification is for something he's always known: that Alhaitham is listening to him, and then, even beyond that, rather, that he's elicited something in Alhaitham that Alhaitham hadn't wanted to give.

And it's not that Alhaitham isn't generous. Kaveh knows Alhaitham is generous: is constantly reminded of it, living in a house that he doesn't own, eating food that he doesn't buy, working jobs that Alhaitham none-too-subtly pushes towards him by commenting dryly in front of potential clients that the Light of Kshahrewar could use some work right now. Kaveh just wants more than what Alhatiahm can give him, always; it's what Alhaitham keeps on saying to him, that he can't be satisfied.

For what part of Kaveh isn't desirous? No one who dresses like Kaveh does — who makes art the way Kaveh does, giving life to creations that so blatantly draw the eye — is the kind of person who can exist without attention. Look at me, Kaveh can't help but say in the way that he dresses to the way that he works: give me your attention, your time, and sometimes Alhaitham will level that intent stare on him and his skin will jump with something raw and instinctive the way the sound an animal makes a sound when wounded is raw and instinctive. The idea of being called selfless by others only makes Kaveh feel like chalk's been smeared over his tongue because he knows so deeply that he's not; there's self-pity, and then there's objective flaw. A lack of structural integrity; that's what Kaveh has.

"Did you buy this?" says Alhaitham. There's no way to tell how long they've been quiet for. The passage of time escapes Kaveh. Kaveh's eyes slant over Alhaitham as he tests his tongue against the inside of his teeth as subtly as he can: it feels unwieldy, thick. Alhaitham is holding a bag in his hands, the food long gone cold; in it are the remnants of the breakfast Kaveh's client had bought him, ordered before he was there to protest, as if it were a gift that could smooth over her rejection. He'd eaten a quarter of it reluctantly, and then tucked away the rest of it away in Mehrak, stomach turning at the idea of eating more. He didn't normally eat breakfast.

Alhaitham likes that cafe. Kaveh knows this because Alhaitham will visit it sometimes even when it's chock-full of Akademiya students and families and he has to stand in line for an obnoxiously long time, which is honestly nothing short of a marvel, because Alhaitham famously hates being inconvenienced, much less being inconvenienced when he's eating or sleeping. He'd brought it back for him.

Kaveh opens his mouth to give a reply, then shuts it. It's the right decision in the end, because a few blurry moments later Kaveh is heaving above a bush while Alhaitham silently tucks his hair behind his ear, one hand adjusting Kaveh's cape so it doesn't get in the way, and Alhaitham must have put the rest of the food away in Mehrak again because Kaveh can't see it anymore even after he straightens up. It's that — more than the weight of Alhaitham's body against his, certainly — that makes him flush with self-satisfaction, hot with heady triumph. It's like he can see Alhaitham in that uniform again, green cap and all, caught in something he hadn't intended to do, debated into a corner that he couldn't back out of, startled and irritated and faintly dissatisfied, the corner of his expression pulled together as he realized what he'd said had implicated himself more than anyone else.

You keep on surrounding yourself with people that take what you can't afford, said ten times, or at least a hundred, closer to a thousand than not.

I'm giving it, thinks Kaveh: the fundamental difference, defined.










It's late at night when Kaveh wakes up, which doesn't alarm him. His sleep comes in fits and bursts, and he's more concerned about the throbbing in his head and the taste at the back of his throat, which are bad enough to make him stumble in the direction in the bathroom until he can rinse his mouth. Then, still feeling vaguely awful, he leans against the edge of the tile and closes his eyes until the world stops spinning. He hadn't thought he'd drank so much yesterday, and now that he thinks that he thinks about how he'd had no reason to drink so much, really, because the day hadn't really been that bad, all things considered, and he'd made a vow to himself to stop drinking last week, especially since it wasn't something he could necessarily afford, but it'd had the taste of something he knew he wasn't going to achieve even back then, which is also a taste he's familiar with as the taste of bad decisions and one too many glasses of wine. And that only serves to remind him of the awful state he's in, so he tries to stop thinking and puts his head between his hands, forcing himself to take steady, even breaths.

He can hear, in the distance, the sound of someone getting up and padding closer, and for a moment he thinks about closing the bathroom door, which he would do if only not for the idea of standing up doing the opposite of appealing to him at the moment. Instead, it manages to bring out such an innate repulsion that he nearly gags at the idea itself, which does not bode well for the next few hours of Kaveh's existence and well-being. Alhaitham appears faintly in the corner of his vision, mostly distinguishable by who else could it be and the appearance of his sleepwear, which Kaveh sorts doing the laundry. The patterns are easily identified, even though Kaveh was only really able to see him from the hip-down in his position, until Alhaitham kneels down and studies Kaveh openly, as if memorizing this moment for later reference. It's vaguely irritating, but not enough to overpower the general unhappiness his body's projecting at him right now.

"You drank a lot today," says Alhaitham, which strikes Kaveh as unusually brief for him. There's usually another part to it — that Kaveh does not just imagine, no matter what Tighnari implies — like, I thought you'd sworn to quit drinking? or I suppose that's only expected, considering the consistency of your self-destructive habits. It unsettles Kaveh enough that he stops squinting into the general vicinity of the wall and past Alhaitham's elbow to look at him properly, trying to discern what he can from Alhaitham's impassive expression even in the throes of his physical form sending him unhappy sensory messages.

"I didn't mean to," Kaveh says defensively, which then in turn leads to a whole host of implications, those he immediately regrets ever giving voice to: like the idea that Kaveh can't control how much he drinks, like an addict, or that he doesn't know his limits any more despite drinking regularly, even though everyone drinks regularly: it's a normal thing to do! Who doesn't drink in Sumeru, honestly, Alhaitham included — no matter what Lambad's sidelong comments about his status of regular imply, and then, even more defensively: "And it's not like it's any of your business. Honestly, Alhaitham, I'm a grown man. I can have a drink when I want to, can't I?"

"I'd say it became my business when I had to carry you back from Lambad's," says Alhaitham, stingingly matter-of-fact. Kaveh would protest the word carry if the details of how he got back weren't so foggy right now, and the sense of defeat burns. If it is defeat: and it must be, because Kaveh doesn't want to examine it more closely. "I thought your client approved your sketch."

"Oh, she did," says Kaveh, and laughs despite himself, even though it hurts. "And then she rejected it. I mean — she says — she wants me to redo it, all of it! I spent days on that design, did you know that? It took me forever to figure out what she wanted. All she told me was I want you to reinvent the idea of a 'hotel': make it stylishly modern in a way that appeals to international patrons' sense of home, but make sure to preserve the authenticity of Sumeru's traditional cultural elements. It's a miracle I was able to come up with a sketch at all!"

And he likes it: that's the problem, more than anything. More than the way she'd thrown his reputation in his face and the accusation that he's producing subpar work for her, riding the coattails of his past creations when he should be making more, he likes it. Even when Kaveh had struggled through about twenty-seven different drafts that ranged in levels of completion from a few vague shapes traced on paper and then discarded to fully-fledged drawings where he'd begun to look at color, pacing restlessly across their living room until Alhaitham came out and complained about it, then going outside to pace restlessly around Sumeru City until people started giving him strange looks, he'd liked it what he came up with, in the end, that sweeping, carefully-designed hotel that he'd envisioned. He'd found it beautiful. He still does. And it isn't his most outstanding work, and he still can't talk about it without qualifiers, just like he can't talk about any other project of his without qualifiers, such as his regrets surrounding the project or the constraints they'd faced in practice that theory didn't account for, but he'd thought it was beautiful, and he'd been so elated that she'd found it beautiful too, without argument, that he'd somehow created and simplified and delivered this vision to her in a way that elicited the perfect visual joy within her that he always wanted to elicit.

That's what they don't understand: no matter how much they try — or don't try — neither Cyno nor Tighnari nor Alhaitham's field of study revolve around art the way Kaveh's does. From it, he feels painfully, nakedly vulnerable. How to communicate that the things he makes are not only things that come from him and his mind, like the papers they'd written in their time at the Akademiya, but the things that reflect his own beliefs beyond the academic, the art that the scholars had shunned for so long, the illogical parts of the human heart that couldn't be quantified, like something shameful? Every design he makes is a reflection of what Kaveh sees, his perspective laid bare; every corner and arch and beam his understanding of the world bottled whole, begging for people to see it.

This is what I love, it says, the swoop of an archway in the shadow of a curve of a too-familiar throat shaded in gray, that delicate junction between one part of the body to the other that was door and passageway too. This is what I find beautiful, the shape of my desire.

"That's unexpected," says Alhaitham in a tone of voice that suggests he does not, in fact, find it unexpected, but Kaveh is now on too much of a roll to let that stop him, though it's certainly a future point of contention in one of their next arguments. Alhaitham's habit of mocking Kaveh by agreeing with him or posing at least vaguely agreeable statements is one of their most well-worn quarrels. "What changed her mind?"

"Nothing," says Kaveh, sharp, wanting to shake his head but unable to, so just — sitting there. The reflection of himself in Alhaitham's eyes seems so small. "She says it was nothing, and that's what I have to redo it for: nothing, all of that work down the drain, just like that… I should have known that was going to happen," he adds, viciously annoyed, the good humor draining out of him with a suddenness that surprises even himself. "It always does, doesn't it? There's always something. I haven't had a project be approved on the first pass since… I shouldn't have assumed," he says to himself, keenly reproachful, and then, correcting himself automatically, like a proper Akademiya graduate: "I shouldn't have expected."

Alhaitham's hand reaches out and cups his face. In theory, this would be a tender movement. In practice, his touch is so clearly clinical that it has about the same amount of romance as Tighnari opening his mouth to swab the underside of his tongue, which hurts more than it has any reason to, and this hurts, too: Kaveh leaning his cheekbone into Alhaitham's hand, weary and sick and dirty, and Alhaitham tilts his chin up slightly, the edge of his finger pressing into the tender underside of Kaveh's jaw. It reminds him of how they used to kiss, almost. Alhaitham is still.

"Alhaitham," Kaveh says, quiet. It bounces off of the tile to turn back on himself. Kaveh closes his eyes, not wanting to see the warped reflection of himself, devoid of its real color, off of those glossy surfaces. He loves those tiles. He's always loved those tiles. He'd replaced the ones Alhaitham had, commissioned a set that he'd hand-painted, sitting on the daybed in the central room, knowing the true shade of the colors and how they'd look when they were installed in here without having to go outside to work on account of the stained glass. Even by then, he'd known had the warmth of these walls could transfigure the sight of things. His throat feels like it's lined with sand. "Do you remember when I went to the desert when we were students with Daya and Anis?"

"I remember," Alhaitham murmurs. He can hear the shift of fabric as Alhaitham settles down on the floor. "You sprained your wrist."

"They came to see me in the infirmary," Kaveh says. He can see it in his mind: the look they'd exchanged, gingerly sitting on the chair next to him, and the way he'd been confused at it. The strangely bitter note in Daya's voice as she'd talked to him. "They said… they couldn't work on the project anymore. That the difference between what I could see and they could was too great."

It's not worth it, working next to you, Anis had said. And when he'd recoiled, her voice had softened, and she'd reached over, putting her hand over his uninjured one. You'll be a great architect someday, Kaveh. It's just… we're on different levels, aren't we? We just don't think that we're fit for it the way you are.

"An unreasonable conclusion," says Alhaitham. A strand of hair falls across Kaveh's eyebrow, escaping the back of his ear, tangling against the shape of his eyelashes. Kaveh wishes he could see Alhaitham's face, but he doesn't… "The sole reason the Akademiya exists is to bridge the difference in levels of learning."

"They were taking responsibility," Kaveh says, soft. "Daya thought the reason they were the reason I got hurt. She felt like it wouldn't have happened if I worked alone."

"Quitting a project because you've made a mistake is the opposite of responsibility," Alhaitham says, his voice flat. "They were irresponsible."

"I should have fought for it," Kaveh says.

"What?"

"I should have fought for it," he repeats fiercely, opening his eyes. "It was a good design. These clients — they don't know anything about it. They don't. But I do. I should've convinced her, changed her mind somehow… that's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? I can't… I'm not supposed to… I can't submit a mediocre work, Alhaitham, I — but it was good, I know it was; it was good," he says, reaching for Alhaitham's collar, which is startlingly in reach: his fingers hover in front of it, half a breath away, his gaze locked onto Alhaitham's beseeching. They waver, skate against the edge of the fabric. But he doesn't look away. "Wasn't it?"

"Go back to bed, Kaveh," says Alhaitham. His voice is very small, or very low, or something between those two. Alhaitham, Kaveh's learned, does not know how to speak gently, or just doesn't, not to Kaveh. But sometimes, when Kaveh allows himself the indulgence of dreaming — so foreign and unfamiliar still, even after these months of occupied slumber — he thinks Alhaitham's tenderness would sound like this: exactly the same as Alhaitham always sounds, only directed towards him specifically, the difference only captured by something as meaningless as volume, which varies based on intent and occasion, wielded by someone who cares very little about the norms of conveying intent or obeying occasion. "I'll fetch you water."










And he does go back to bed, apparently, because when Kaveh wakes up he's in his own bed again with only a vague sense of loss, which he ascribes to not being awake enough or well enough previously to remember the whole events of how he'd gotten back to bed specifically, and that's before accounting for the blurry recollection of how, exactly, that night of getting back from Lambad's had transpired, but he does feel only moderately hungover.

He almost regrets it: in the absence of anything else to focus on, his mind strays to what the Traveler had talked to him about when they'd been in Sumeru a while ago, which was surprisingly not about the mortifying crisis he'd had over one of his projects but the conversation they'd had when Kaveh was walking back from Pardis Dhyai, the traveler saying that they also needed to go back to Sumeru City, which they both knew was a flimsy excuse for making sure Kaveh — tipsy, still — got home safe, especially since Alhaitham had been occupied with something.

Kaveh had been complaining about something or the other: Alhaitham, surely, and what was it that had been bothering him at the time? It was the books — he remembers it was about the Books at the House of Daena, and how Alhaitham had taken the liberty of telling Kaveh that they'd been relegated to the innermost section of the bookshelves, and he'd borrowed one of them to show Kaveh as proof, just in case he wanted to review what he'd written. And he'd added, especially since no one reads these now, inscrutable as always, except he was fucking with Kaveh, Kaveh had known he was fucking with him, but the joke was on Alhaitham, surely, because Kaveh had opened it.

And on the third or so page — or the thirteenth, more accurately, or the thirty-third, or the three-hundredth, where Kaveh had flipped through the pages in increasing panic — someone had actually left a comment thanking Kaveh for his annotations, so obviously they weren't as useless as Alhaitham insinuated, and even Alhaitham's flimsy counterargument hadn't managed to dim Kaveh's buoyant mood afterward.

And he was talking about this, he remembers now, in the context of moving out: as soon as possible, he'd told the Traveler fervently, and meant it. I'll get a house, a room, anything, and the Traveler had made a noise of vague and general agreement.

Then: "Kaveh," the Traveler had said, earnestly curious, "If you love architecture so much, don't you want to design your own house instead of moving into someone else's?"

And of course Kaveh does. It's just also that he doesn't really: the thing most people don't understand is that even when Kaveh doesn't have a roof over his head he has a roof in his hand: vast and expansive, enveloping him in its shadow. The sky is as flat as a painted ceiling, its length measured in the beam of his hand as he holds it up, shading his eyes against the sky; the world is my home, the wanderers in books used to say, and Kaveh sees it, feels it too — he knows, in the quiet, certain way that understanding buries itself in the bones, how the shape of space is made for living. That's not to say that Kaveh doesn't want to build himself a house — though the logistics of doing so make him balk, much less with his debt — or that he can't envision himself in a house specifically made for him, which he can, and very easily; it would be infinitely easier to transform his requirements for a house (easily translated into specifications and numbers and blueprints) into reality than his clients'. Kaveh knows what he likes and knows it well: that's not the problem.

But the thing about making a space for yourself — for anyone — is that it necessitates you moving out of the space that you already occupied prior, which isn't a problem when there wasn't a space you were occupying before, like in the case of children in the desert being built new schoolhouses where there was only dead, sifting sand before, or at least not dedicated structures to learning instead of villagers' living rooms where children clustered at kitchen tables and scrawled down notes. And having a space for you does not necessarily make it your home; Kaveh, whose years for the Akademiya were defined by the certainty of his place there on account of his indisputable good grades and also the stark, uncomfortable understanding that even the faces that smiled at him politely were talking behind his back about how he was a half-orphan with a dead desert-deserted father, knows that having a space carved out specifically for you somewhere — anywhere — does not automatically make it a home, nor does he know what having a home necessarily is, though if anyone should know this it's Kaveh. But that's what being a scholar is, as the Akademiya had taught them; understanding that everything could be proven, and rather, that everything should be proven and deduced, even the most basic of principles, because those defined everything else, though they certainly wouldn't have expected Kaveh to apply this to a home rather than, say, a canal.

What he does know is this: Kaveh is awfully, terribly homesick, not in the sense that he misses a home, but rather that he aches for one, is hungry for one, and all he does only serves to whet his appetite. His mother sometimes invites him to come see her in Fontaine, and he thinks about it, rubs the letter-paper between his fingers; is caught by nostalgic recollection of what it was like, growing up with her in their old house, with the swing she'd built for him for no reason other than he'd wanted one. Tighnari mentions to him that Gandharva Ville's housing is significantly cheaper than that of Sumeru City, and gives him a meaningful, loaded look after Kaveh tells him something incriminating about the fight he just had with Alhaitham. Even Cyno's dropped a brief comment on the lodgings available in the desert, and with gratifyingly less apprehension to Kaveh than when he says the word "desert" around Tighnari, because at least Kaveh is used to those conditions, though not as much as a native — but something in him remains deeply skeptical of that possessiveness — a home, my home — manifesting if he were to move, even if he took all of his possessions with him.

The Traveler would say that a home is defined by its people: for them, it must be their twin. Kaveh — thinks about it, still. He lives with Alhaitham; he refers to the place of residence that they both share as home, colloquially, without appending the same importance to correctness as Alhaitham does to every word that passes through his mouth. It seems childish to mull on it more; what is he, a child? Adults have a place to live and return to, which must be their home — but this feels so reminiscent of the teachings of the Akademiya under the instruction of their previous grand sage that Kaveh immediately feels vaguely guilty for thinking it at all. If he were to move with Alhaitham — who must be the "person" who defines his home, seeing as he doesn't live with anyone else, despite the fact that moving with Alhaitham would defeat the point of moving at all — would that make a new place of residence his home?

No, it would not, he feels, with a sudden, powerful certainty, that it would not, or at least not inspire the same sense of familiarity that the well-worn door of their house now does, and the shoe rack that Kaveh had designed so Alhaitham could get his shoes without having to bend down from whatever he's doing that Kaveh does not use, because it'd spark too many questions if someone came in and noticed Kaveh's shoes next to Alhaitham's, and the coat rack that he'd commissioned from an old classmate in exchange for a handmade doll's house for her daughter that perfectly accommodates the shape of Kaveh's cape and Alhaitham's cloak, and even if moved these things would not serve the same person as their owners — because of the land, he hypothesizes. The differences in climate, in neighborhood, even in altitude, but not, he thinks, so much as it's walking in on Alhaitham dutifully doing the wrist exercises that Alhaitham's done since he was thirteen, or the other, less bearable way to say it — that a home is not defined by people or things or ownership or design, but rather a space extended to you that you have not asked for.

So it just so happens that what Kaveh wants the most is what he hates the most and what makes him the most uncomfortable. He's thought about talking about it before — gods know he's been asked — what it was like, when Alhaitham asked him about moving in with him, but the truth is the memory makes him want to vomit again, though he's vomited so many times that he feels like he can ascribe that to the general nausea and also he has nothing left to vomit anymore: a deep and pervasive shame and unease and guilt and humiliation so viscerally grotesque that he still has no idea why he agreed, only that he had, and is now pathetically grateful for it. But these feelings are normal. or they must be normal, or else Alhaitham wouldn't be giving him so many reminders about them, or how Alhaitham is allowing him to live with him; they're to be expected of anyone in his situation, surely, a washed-up genius living with his ex-boyfriend, which, in Sumeru City, is likely to not be as rare as one might think it is.

"Kaveh," says Alhaitham from the door. Kaveh jumps, trying very hard to look like he hasn't been thinking about Alhaitham, and must manage it to some degree, because Alhaitham's gaze only lingers minutely on Kaveh's very wrinkled shirt, which does smell even to himself even when he wears it, and then trails back to his face, where Kaveh touches his cheek self-consciously, wondering if something's there. The trace of his drool, maybe, or creases from his pillow. For a moment Alhaitham looks like he's going to talk about last night, Kaveh drinking, the vague snatches of conversation that Kaveh does remember that he staunchly does not want to talk about, and that he desperately hopes for that reason that Alhaitham does not want to talk about either.

But Alhaitham doesn't say anything, so Kaveh croaks: "what?"

The ensuing silence gives Kaveh time to take in what Alhaitham looks like, which is: the same as Alhaitham always looks, except without his cloak on and wearing his indoor slippers and with his hair uncombed, which doesn't really mean anything since it's shorter than Kaveh's and therefore more manageable. He could draw this exact scene without looking at Alhaitham now that he's seen it, the same way he'd draw Alhaitham on any other occasion: first by the lines of his body, the angle which he's holding himself by, measured by the relative distance of everything else in the room, least of which not being Kaveh himself, and then the measured depth of his body, the distance, the weight, the give of Alhaitham's flesh as tangible as his shadow against Kaveh's pencil, and then his face — that, Kaveh knows.

"You'll miss your meeting if you don't get ready now," says Alhaitham, and breaks that spell: the clear map of his features Kaveh has in the filtered light shifts as he takes a step back, letting the dappled peacock-shades of the hallway window cascade over his features. This distracts Kaveh so much he nearly misses what Alhaitham says.

"What?" he says incredulously, his voice rising, and then: "You couldn't wake me up earlier?!" as he's tugging his shirt off, stumbling off of the bed with an extreme lack of grace as Alhaitham lifts his cup to his mouth while he (purposefully!) does not look at Kaveh's expression of abject betrayal as he throws open his closet, calls Mehrak to his side, and just very belatedly remembers as he's scurrying out the door to grab his blueprint — a different one, for a different client — off of the worktable before the door closes behind him, Alhaitham left, strangely enough, at the threshold of his bedroom, blandly observing the pieces of clothing Kaveh's left strewn on his floor. Alhaitham's holding a book, but for once he's not looking at it. His eyes are resting on something that Kaveh can't see.











"I almost thought you weren't coming," says his client: a somewhat nervous-looking middle-aged man, which for some reason tends to be Kaveh's usual clientele. Tighnari has told Kaveh that this must mean that his name on architectural work must be reassuring, while Cyno remarked that most men in Sumeru were nervous-looking, and then Tighnari had said, amused, that he was fairly certain that Cyno only thought that because they looked nervous around Cyno specifically. Then Alhaitham had asked for Kaveh's impression on the reasons behind him still being in so much debt if he had enough work to have a regular clientele.

Kaveh laughs nervously, glancing at the clock, but it isn't wrong: he's on time, perfectly so, with only a handful of seconds to spare. He sinks into the plush seat across from his client, wishing that he'd taken him up on his offer to meet Kaveh halfway: I wouldn't want you to go out of your way, past Kaveh had said, which, in true past Kaveh fashion, is a decision that current Kaveh now regrets. Steadily, because he's certain, Kaveh says: "It looks like I'm right on time."

"Oh, I know," the man says, and he does smile, and his tone is genial and perfectly friendly. "I just heard that you were always early."

And it's true that Kaveh is normally early. He endeavors to be early, primarily because he doesn't trust his luck enough that he can just assume that his way to work will be unhindered and obstacle-free, especially if he makes himself run on the sort of timeable where he would be cutting it close if he left the house any later. It's better than being on time, generally speaking, as long as he isn't too early, and he's usually never that, and it's certainly better than being late. (Alhaitham always makes it a point to arrive to his work precisely on time.)

Yet the whole conversation sets him on edge for some reason, but he makes himself smile, which he's decently good at, and this time he's even fairly certain that it doesn't look like a grimace.

"Well, I'm hear now, aren't I?" he says, and reaches for Mehrak, encouraging it to deposit the tube on the table, and Mehrak does. He's oddly light: Kaveh must have taken everything else out when he'd returned yesterday, or Alhaitham must have done it when they'd returned home to put the food away, leaving nothing but Kaveh's usual tools inside. He pushes the thought out of his mind as he reaches out, depositing the paper on the table in its scroll, and while that's there he takes the time to clear the table, moving little plates of imported candies that he dearly hopes his client didn't buy for him but for themselves instead out of the way, because there's what looks like gold flakes in one of them.

The man doesn't move his cup from the center of the table, which is fine, but Kaveh doesn't feel like it's polite for him to move it for him without asking, and it also feels like he's missed his opportunity to ask. In the few seconds that it's taken him to think this, the man has pushed it even further onto the table that Kaveh has just cleared to put his blueprint on, and so Kaveh chooses to say nothing at all. Fine! Let him put his cup there. He gets up, twisting the tube open, and takes out the scroll. Mehrak pins one corner of the blueprint to the back of his chair while he holds the other end standing, demonstratively gesturing as he talks.

"So I looked at your notes from our last meeting," Kaveh says, determinedly ignoring the stubborn pain in his head "And I incorporated the changes you asked for, starting right here with your request to get rid of the ramp and instead implement sets of stairs — which, as I mentioned, would necessitate a change in materials and design, as the significant charge in comparative incline…"











And after the meeting, Kaveh goes and collapses onto a bench in the middle of the Grand Bazaar, Mehrak kept absentmindedly by his side with one hand on it and his Dendro vision very pointedly glowing on his lap in case someone tries to take Mehrak, which has happened a few times before. To be honest, even with his vision Kaveh is somewhat of a sub-par fighter compared to other vision users, at least as far as he knows, and certainly the worst fighter out of everyone he knows personally even if you include Collei. But the threat of a vision is enough to ward away most pickpockets and thieves, which is unfortunately a subset of people Kaveh is intimately familiar with; he's been told, on many separate occasions, that he has the air of someone who is say to take advantage of, or, in the case of Cyno, who had told him this to his face, that he was someone who was easy to take advantage of, end of sentence. Alhaitham has advised him on multiple occasions to stop pausing for everyone: sad-looking children who tug on his clothes and ask him if he has any spare change, or well-dressed men who promise him they've left their wallets at home, and they're just trying to catch the next caravan to Port Ormos… but isn't it worth it, Kaveh had said, unable to understand, if just one of those people was really in dire straits, and he helped them when no one else didn't because they were too — jaded?

And Alhaitham had gotten that pinched look on his face that he denied having that he wore whenever someone said something that he found particularly stupid or disagreeable, and they'd argued over that: what the specifics were, Kaveh couldn't recall no matter how he tried, and the more he tried to the more he found that he didn't want to. There was so much that they argued about, an enormous volume at an enormous frequency, that the more time passed the more it was rapidly becoming clear that the data pointed to one conclusion, like two lines converging or the trend of a graph only becoming more apparent when enough data had been collected: that they were fundamentally, inevitably incompatible.

It had seemed so easy when they were back in the Akademiya. Back then arguments had seemed so simple: merely debates, meant to sharpen your rhetoric and strengthen your ideologies. Now older, the "correctness" that the debates of the Akademiya had meant to inspire seems less and less important to Kaveh: a life lived well is not necessarily a life lived correctly. That begged only one more question: then why did they argue?

"Senior Kaveh," says someone, interrupting him from his thoughts. Startled, Kaveh looks up. "Is it really you?"

"Shahram," he says, surprised. It really is him: broad-shouldered and tanned, a new scar across his outside forearm that hadn't been there when they were studying in Kshahrewar together. He's holding something in his hand, jogging closer to Kaveh, and Kaveh sits up properly to try to look like less of a mess than he is. "I didn't expect to see you here. Didn't you say you were going to move out of the city to find work?"

"I came back," Shahram says, shrugging, and flashes him a smile that's slightly shy. "Me and a friend of mine managed to save up enough money to open a shop in the city, so we decided to come back. Jewelry, of course," he said, laughing: "I don't know if you remember, but I wasn't really ever good with figures and numbers the way you were. But working with stones and ore was alright."

"You said you'd had experience with metalworking," says Kaveh, reminiscing. They hadn't talked that much then, but they'd spent a decent amount of time together. Shahram had asked him for help in his classes, and Kaveh had dug up his old notes from the years before and lent them to him. They'd spent hours in the library during exam periods, flipping through the same books. "Because your father was a blacksmith."

"Yes," says Shahram. A faint note of surprise colors his voice. "He's retired now. I didn't expect you to remember."

"Of course I remember," Kaveh says, surprised in turn. "He came to visit you in the Akademiya when he heard about how well you did with your classes, didn't he? I remember professors from other darshans were trying to recruit you for months after your exam results your first few years."

"I wasn't that impressive," Shahram says, flushed. "I'm sure you had even more offers extended to you, senior."

"Ah," says Kaveh, awkward. "Um, no, not really." He'd gotten none, actually: a few comments, maybe, but they hadn't been invitations so much as they'd been if only you turned that mind of yours towards… and then the last part would be whatever field the commenter's respective darshan entailed. When he'd first enrolled, maybe, but that wasn't because of his talent insofar as it'd been because they were just looking for bodies and funding.

"Really?" says Shahram, and then he laughs. "I guess that's because no one could see you anywhere else but Kshahrewar."

Kaveh laughs too, even more awkwardly, and casts his gaze desperately around to look for something else to talk about. Any change of topic will do. There: "Is that your work?" Kaveh says, gesturing at Shahram's hands.

"Right," says Shahram, and then, "Oh, right, um — actually, senior, hang on a moment," and rummages with what he'd been holding in his hands, which turns out to be a velveteen box, which snaps open to reveal an array of rings. It's dwarfed in Shahram's hands, but he's gentle as he pulls one out of its slot: and then, bafflingly, puts it into Kaveh's hands. "Why don't you take this? To promote our shop's opening. I think it'll fit; try it on."

"This is beautiful," Kaveh says honestly, too surprised to respond properly. "Thank you, I mean — I'll be sure to recommend your shop, but—"

"I couldn't see it, either," says Shahram, rerouting to their previous topic of conversation so abruptly it takes Kaveh aback. "You in another darshan, I mean. But I'm glad you chose to study technology."

"... I am, too," says Kaveh, slowly, his fingers still frozen around the ring, and tries for it again. "But—"

"Senior, are you — I guess — are you busy today?"

There are revisions he needs to do for both of his projects, one of which needs him to redo the whole thing entirely from scratch, and he needs to take the bath he should've already taken after he got back from Lambad's, and he's still left his newest piece in the living room instead of cleaning it up. And he needs to do the laundry again, and pick up his new paint samples from the merchant he'd commissioned, and he hasn't written back his reply to Cyno's latest invitation to play TCG yet even though he'd meant to. But: "Not very," says Kaveh, and it doesn't cost him anything at all to say. "Do you need my help with something?"

"Not help, exactly," Shahram, steadily growing a redder and redder shade of pink.

Which could mean nothing, Kaveh begins to think somewhat desperately. Many people are pink when talking to Kaveh. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a testament to the exaggerated praise of people not even familiar with architecture who praise it as good only because other people say it's good, which has always been one of Kaveh's greatest fears, next to making work not worthy of praise at all. "Oh, er…"

"I was thinking I could buy you dinner, or something," Shahram says. "If you wanted."

Which could still mean nothing. People who shared darshans bought each other meals all the time! Kaveh bought his juniors meals all the time when they bumped into each other and they started talking about the Palace of Alcazarzaray and how much they'd loved it and how they were just sure Kaveh was reaping the well-deserved rewards of his genius. Granted, Kaveh usually bought others their meals, considering he was their upperclassman, but it didn't have to mean anything.

"No, it's quite alright," says Kaveh, very carefully. "I can pay. I'm your senior, aren't I?"

"Well, yes," Shahram says, now a pure crimson. "But I'm not asking as your junior."

Kaveh can't help it: he goggles at him. Objectively speaking, Kaveh doesn't think he's bad looking, but he's certain that there are undeniably bruises underneath his eyes and that his skin is more sallow than it usually is, and he has a creeping suspicion that the drinking he does is beginning to creep up on him in a visually perceptible way. His clothes are wrinkled and he only put half of the hairpins in today, so his hair is askew, and he's more than sure that he doesn't smell good enough for him to be in close quarters with anyone, much less for anyone to want to be in close quarters with him. Right now, he's not horrendously bad-looking, but he looks worse than anyone should be, in order to be hit on by a junior he's sure didn't hold romantic intentions towards him before — and he's fairly certain that his responses are delayed a slight bit from what's normal because his headache is killing him, now that it's bloomed to a full-blown migraine, and he's chosen one of the shirts that he'd stretched out drying it by accident so it slips off his shoulders from where he'd hung it to expose more of his gaunt shoulders than is strictly necessary, and makes him look like he has very puffy shoulder joints from the shape of the excess fabric.

"I don't know," he says, as nicely as he can, but Shahram immediately droops. Kaveh immediately tacks on: "It's not that I'm not very flattered, I just—"

"It's because of Alhaitham, isn't it," Shahram says, dejected.

Incredulously, Kaveh says, "Alhaitham?"

But that must be taken as a confirmation, because Shahram corrects himself, rambling: "I mean, of course you would like Alhaitham. He's a very likeab — he's very intelligent," he says, unable to finish the first word, which at least proves that to Kaveh that Shahram hasn't gone completely insane, "And he's so… direct. He's like a straight line. And you love algebra. And geometry."

Kaveh, knocked off-kilter and unable to find a way to properly reply without screeching ALHAITHAM?, which is definitely not the thing he wants to do around a devastated junior who's just confessed to him, is forced to agree; he does love algebra, and geometry, and physics, and the study of the world around him in all of the tangible ways he knows, and even the ways that he doesn't.

Shahram tells him to keep the ring, looking far more heartbroken than someone Kaveh hasn't talked to for years would be expected to look at being turned down, and then by the time that he vanishes into the middle distance Kaveh's shoulders have drooped and he's sighing, pressing the crease between his thumb and forefinger to his forehead as he lowers himself back onto the bench to stave off the throbbing in his head when he sees Alhaitham standing there, looking in the direction that Shahram had went.

"Were you listening in?" Kaveh demands immediately, unable to hold himself back.

"No," says Alhaitham. He turns to look at Kaveh, unperturbed, and says mercilessly, "But the context of the conversation seemed clear enough. He confessed to you?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Kaveh declares, sagging back in his seat, and he shuts his eyes, massaging at the sides of his head. "What are you doing here?"

"It's my lunch break," says Alhaitham.

"You never come here on your lunch break," Kaveh says accusatorily, cracking an eye open. "You keep on saying there's too many people and that they all try to haggle and everyone stops you every ten steps you take. And the smell of the food stalls clings to your clothes, which you hate, especially since paper picks up scent so well."

Alhaitham's expression shifts minutely. "I haven't said that," he says. After a pause: "And I've evidently come here today."

Which is true: Kaveh has no reply for that.

"My presence is hardly more noteworthy than what just transpired," adds Alhaitham dryly, which makes Kaveh blink, and frown, and roll the ring around his fingers, which had almost slipped onto one without him realizing it. It really is a well-made ring. He doesn't usually wear any — they throw off his balance when he's working with his hands, and his half-gloves are usually enough for him, decorative and protective without compromising his sense of touch. But it really is stunning, a stone set into inlaid gold. and, Kaveh realizes, looking at it, far too expensive for him to accept.

"I have to give this back to him," Kaveh says, lurching to his feet. Alhaitham watches him with the vague incomprehension of someone who, when they decide to sit down, actually sits down for more than a minute before they're called to stand again by wild compulsions of their mind. Kaveh ignores him, frantically swiveling his head back and forth. Where did Shahram go?

"He left the market a while ago," says Alhaitham, still watching him. Very evenly: "You watched him leave."

Kaveh brandishes the ring at him. Alhaitham makes that pinched face he does. Kaveh lowers his voice and casts his gaze around, hissing, "This looks like real gold, Alhaitham! I can't afford to buy this!"

"I'm well aware," says Alhaitham. "You should count yourself lucky that you didn't have to buy it."

"What are you talking about?" Kaveh demands.

Alhaitham narrows his eyes. "What are you talking about?" he says. "From where I was standing, it seemed obvious that he gave it to you."

"To — encourage me to accept his confession," says Kaveh, gesturing wildly at the ring. Oh, Archons, it's the same color as his eyes. He can't do this. He rotates it in his hand so the stone is facing his palm and starts pacing back and forth rapidly. Alhaitham's eyes follow him. "He obviously gave it to me because he thought his feelings would be reciprocated, but since they weren't—"

"You rejected him?" says Alhaitham abruptly, interrupting him, which is — rare. Strange, even, for Alhaitham, his body facing Kaveh, the plain, naked curiosity in his voice enough to make even Kaveh falter for a step.

Kaveh points at him. "See!" he cries. "It's obviously not a gift that you want the person who rejected you to keep. Just look at it; he could sell this to a customer instead, his shop just opened. They can't afford to be giving money away like this."

And Alhaitham says, "Have you considered that returning it would be far crueller than keeping it?"

Kaveh's instinct is to retort: and what would you know about that?

But even to him, it's not something he can say: not to Alhaitham, who Kaveh had bought trinkets in that distant before that he still saw now, littering the edges of the house, who bought Kaveh the fine, imported paper notebook from Fontaine that Kaveh still uses today for work, its pages larger than the average canvas and perfectly suited to Kaveh's everyday needs; not to Alhaitham, who is the person that knows what it means to like Kaveh the most, more than anyone else in the world, even if it's not something that holds true any longer. Instead, he says: "How?"

"He gave it to you before he confessed, didn't he?" says Alhaitham. The way that he looks at Kaveh is unbearable. It's the same look that Alhaitham always gives Kaveh, the way that he looks at him all the time; there's nothing special about it at all. Kaveh looks away. "If he had needed you to say yes first, he would have given it to you after he ensured his success. The evidence points towards him wanting you to have it regardless of what you were to him."

"People aren't always that logical," says Kaveh. The ring burns cold in his hand.

"Nor are they always illogical," says Alhaitham, and no more.











It doesn't fit his ring finger, but it does fit him. He slips it on the index finger of his right hand, not really wanting to wear it but not wanting to put it in Mehrak, either, on account of how the stone might get damaged from rolling around in it unprotected. There's nothing to keep scratches from forming on its pristine multifaceted surface, and the stone has such a vibrant luster that the idea of damaging it intentionally makes Kaveh's throat squirm uncomfortably. Alhaitham watches this with an expression that Kaveh has no idea how to read, but if he's displeased it's his fault that Kaveh's wearing it, really, even though it makes him enormously nervous to be doing so. As Kaveh passes the stalls of shawls he can't afford, he can't stop thinking about how much it must be worth, and the thought plagues him as he passes the next stall of fruits he can't afford, and then the stall of paintings he can't afford; this singular piece of jewelry is probably worth enough to buy out all three.

And what does Kaveh need jewelry for? He wears it — obviously, he wears earrings — but not rings. His hands were a point of brief self-consciousness for him as a teenager, when he'd thought that everyone was staring at him and scrutinizing every aspect of his appearance: for an architect, their hands were the most important things they had, and his aren't particularly attractive. He does take care of them: oils and manicures them, rubs cream into the creases of his palm to soften the callouses. But it's Alhaitham who has the long, elegant fingers, who works with a pen all day using the proper writing posture that doesn't leave a purpled indent on one of his fingers, his grip never too tight, while Kaveh's been known to carry peculiarly short pencils around because he's snapped them in half without thinking but still can't afford to buy new ones. Kaveh's popped enough blisters that it feels like he's formed an outer shell on top of his flesh. He has thick, knobby knuckles and angled, slanted fingers than the straight, graceful kind, like Alhaitham's, or at least uniformly thick fingers, like Tighnari's, and they lack the inhuman steadiness that Cyno's have, which attract the eye of even the Birmarstan's healers.

"What are you looking for from the House of Daena?" says Alhaitham. Kaveh's gaze flickers up from his study of Alhaitham's wrists, but Alhaitham's looking ahead, glancing at the message boards that they're passing on their way upwards; Alhaitham has steady hands, too.

Kaveh twists the ring on his finger. "It's back to the drawing board," he says. "I thought I should look for some new reference materials, considering the styles I've already pulled from've been rejected. And you were talking about my annotations," he adds, "The other day in Pardis Dhyai; I might as well review them, now that I'm here: there's some great material in those books, you know," he says meaningfully, putting an emphasis on the last part.

Alhaitham only says: "Hm."

That familiar door swings open. Mehrak buzzes inside, familiar with the interior, and Alhaitham beelines towards his office, vanishing into the depths of the interior. Kaveh takes his time: there's a fair number of students still milling around, a few of them slumped over the heart of their studies unresponsively, and he catches sight of a lecturer he knows strolling by out of his peripheral vision, her airy laughter a formerly-forgotten reminder of his school days. He's always loved the interior of the House of Daena; it's one of the parts of the Akademiya that he admires the most. There's nothing like it.

He wanders the bookshelves aimlessly for a moment, just letting himself soak it in. There are new signs of wear here and there, but the wood that they use for the Akademiya's furniture is sensitive to Dendro: infusing it with just a touch of elemental energy can smooth out the nicks with new, controlled growth, a fact that his professors had loved to repeat to Kaveh and his peers until their ears almost bled. It implemented exactly the type of ideology that the Akademiya admired: the idea of harnessing something as wild and unknowable as elemental energy until it could be used for Sumerian innovation.

He pauses. His own name stares at him, clustered among the spines of other, more notable authors, and he hesitates again: runs his fingers over the characters. He can't help himself. His fingers close over the edge, the ring still gleaming back at him. Without thinking, he pulls the volume out.

And then he keeps on gathering books. He collects all of them: the pieces he's written, the textbooks that he'd relied on, every single volume that he can remember reading during his time in the Akademiya, or at least the significant one, and dumps them onto a table. It's not enough. He goes and asks a group of students if they mind if he borrows the table next to them, the one that they're not using (they don't), and then drags that closer to him, too, and keeps on slipping more and more onto that one, too. It doesn't seem polite to look for a third table, so he pulls out the chairs and stacks more still on the seats, one by one, until he can't walk by without his figure disappearing from view entirely.

"What's he doing?" a boy whispers.

"How would I know?" his friend mutters back. "Why don't you ask him?"

There's no space for him to sit, in the end: he's used it all. Kaveh looks at Mehrak, who spins in response, and then he sighs, tucking his cape over his shoulder so it doesn't pool on the ground. He snags a book off of the topmost pile and makes to sit cross-legged on the floor.

When Kaveh wants inspiration, he'll usually go looking somewhere else. Looking at the city is no good: for one thing, staring at others' designs hoping to come up with something of your own tends to end up in a work too derivative for Kaveh to feel comfortable with. The ancient ruins in the desert are different: they force him to be innovative with his work, because the technology used to create the monuments no longer exist; any concept of replication then becomes the concept of creation in the first place. But trips to the desert are long, and somewhat expensive, honestly: they're not something Kaveh can complete in half a day's time, much less without preparation.

His colleagues, other architects he knows, would say that they'd look at other forms of art, something entirely different. Dancing and plays are novel entertainment now that the Akademiya no longer disapproves of them, but Kaveh's wallet doesn't allow for him to just buy a ticket; the pottery and ceramics populating Sumeru's many markets are a secondary choice, but Kaveh always ends up buying something that he also can't afford, and then there's painting, and music, where he hasn't picked up his dutar in ages, even though he always means to. But inspiration is fickle and rarely strikes Kaveh no matter what methods he uses to obtain it, much less when he's actively looking for it, and when he uses methods that worked in the past they seem to lose more of their shine and efficacy each time.

It'd been so simple in the past. Hadn't it? He'd been able to put himself on paper so fearlessly, with such a bright and undampened optimism that Kaveh now feels singularly removed from the him of his past: was it just the ignorance of the world that had made it so easy, or an ignorance of his own art? He had known life as an architect wasn't going to be easy, even back then: had seen it in every tense line of his mother's mouth and the way that she held herself at her worktable.

Kshahrewar, she'd said. That's where I studied.

And he'd thought it was pride at the time, but it hadn't been that: only a wry resignation, as if she'd known that it was coming without wanting it to.

The flaws in his work have grown more and more apparent with age, though the ways to fix them have become increasingly more and more obscure. His former self is amateurish in comparison, only being able to grasp that things were wrong or unideal without being able to explain why — and ignorance begets blind courage, Kaveh hears in Cyno's voice, his low, steady tone a precursor to his warnings about the desert's dangers. His grip on the book tightens. Kaveh forces his gaze to steady on the page.

It's odd to look back on himself. He'd wanted to erase some of his annotations when he was still a student, but the Akademiya's rules had mandated the use of ink. Particularly fastidious students draft theirs first before gravely imparting their knowledge onto future generations, but Kaveh hadn't: he'd scrawled thoughtlessly in every book he'd gotten his hands on, writing whatever came to mind first. In some of them his handwriting becomes slanted, almost like the lines of a shape, rather than letters, and his characters begin to blur and slide into each other in an imitation of cursive. He touches the page here. His hand had gone slack, he sees, and loose; he'd been about to draw instead of write in his excitement, the content of the book bleeding into the medium of his note-taking.

The edge of his ring, clunky and alien, drags against the textured paper, threatening to leave marks. Kaveh traces the edge of his annotations, lost in thought. He feels victorious: he should feel victorious. It's proof that Alhaitham's wrong, not to mention the former Grand Conservator: someone has been reading his notes. Any Sumerian scholar who's relied on more than the Akasha knows how a book changes with age, and this isn't that; in several of these, the characters adjacent to his own notes in the margin are lighter than any other part of the pages — someone's traced them. Someone — many people, or one person many times — has run their fingers over the edges of Kaveh's thoughts, over and over, until they've left him and worn away onto the reader: felt the shape of his mind for their own, dragging their hands over the compass-true lines of the cartography of his heart by touch.

Kaveh looks at it for a long, long time. He's distantly aware of students getting their things and beginning to file out of the library, one by one, and then new students coming in, the faint hush of whispers about what he must be researching, to pull out this many books. There's a glimmer of recognition that periodically sparks about the edges of the room.

Imagine a second Palace of Alcarzarzaray, one student sighs.

It wouldn't be a second, another replies confidently. It'd be something even better.

He closes the book, still looking at it. Then he sets it aside, feeling very odd. There's a chill that sets itself over the surface of his skin, so he puts his hand over his forearm and keeps it there, watching the crooked shape of his vein pulse into his palm, where there's a faint, pale scar bisecting his length from when he'd gotten injured on a solo trip to some desert ruins.

Then he reaches for another book. It's there, too: an odd paleness across the lines, the words entirely rubbed away in some parts, and then pristine in the sections closest to the spine, where Kaveh's left nothing but empty space. And then again in a third volume. And a fourth — not all of them, but the ones that he's written in the most, his thoughts dominating the blanks of the pages until there's almost no room left. In this one he'd doodled on the textured fore-edge of the book. In this one there's sketches of his dorm room at the Akademiya, the pieces of his desk if it were to be disassembled and laid flat. The window that Alhaitham used to sit at, reading, in the corner of the library, before Kaveh added a pillow for him.

The newer texts are mostly untouched. There are a few notes in his own authored books, mostly question marks and circling with some incomprehensible shorthand sprinkled in between, an array of scribbled-out sketches dominating the majority of the pages, and then someone's heart with the initials C+D inside. Someone's left their folded-up Design Fundamentals exam result wedged between the pages, which Kaveh picks out, unfolds, and then re-folds and puts back once he's seen their score, suddenly feeling a deep sympathy towards the newest generation of Kshahrewar's students.

I'm worried about my future, one student complains, boldly penning over the inner cover. I'm about to graduate, and I haven't achieved anything at all. I joined the Akademiya because I thought I'd be able to achieve excellence here, but I feel like I've only fallen behind; everyone here's done something incredible already, even though they're all so young, while I've only focused on my grades. I keep on feeling like there's nothing I'm meant to do.

This is an Environmental Systems textbook, someone's written back.

I KNOW, says the original annotator's response, in even bigger and more bolded handwriting. I CAN READ THE TITLE.

It's actually Foreword to Environmental Systems, not an actual Environmental Systems textbook, a third person's written, their looping, elegant handwriting stark against the page. So neither of you can read the title.

The rest of the page is blank in a way that feels very pointed. It makes the edge of Kaveh's mouth tilt upwards, amused, and he taps the edge of his pen to the paper, about to write a reply: but it is a library text, not a message board, and he can already hear the Grand Conservator's voice harping on about how he's supposed to be a good example to these students as an alumnus. So he draws something instead: a mundane sketch of a famous piece of machinery unearthed by the Akademiya of long ago: the caged-roller bearing.

Historical record showed that it had been made by a nameless scholar near the end of his life. In his youth, he'd been an engineer of some kind: a modest one with little fame and little written about him to prove it, but he'd had six children, one of which who had amassed wealth in the capital and had a family of his own. It was with his grandson in mind, one of the numerous officials under King Deshret's service, that he'd made it, though he'd passed before he could complete his journey to the capital with his gift in hand.

But it had been discovered by his family, in the end, and it'd become a critical part of desert technology back then. Even in Sumeru now, it's essential to their mechanical operations: an invention from the hands of someone who'd never attained fame in their lifespan, who'd never even been named, and who had yet still become the titular character of one of the first lessons that any Kshahrewar student in the Akademiya ever learned in their very first year.

It was one of the first lessons that they forgot, too.












Kaveh puts the books back where they belong: properly, taking the liberty of putting the most unhelpful books on architecture in the saddest, most neglected corners of the House of Daena. The ones that are actually worth reading he sets in the most prominent sections of their respective shelves, and it's only coincidence or good taste that makes it happen so that most of these end up being books that Kaveh's personally annotated.

By the time he's done, the House of Daena is significantly emptier. Only a few students are left: at least half of them are from his darshan, Kaveh thinks, glowing with pride at first before he grows rapidly concerned about the state of Kshahrewar if so many students are staying back this late when it's not even exam season. Alhaitham had come out of his office precisely at the turn of several hours ago, and was occupying a part of the library opposite of Kaveh, so he could see him out of the corner when he turned around, but frustratingly enough even when Kaveh looks at him — just naturally following the line of his body when he turns — he's not looking at Kaveh.

It hadn't been like that when they were younger. Alhaitham's remarked on how Kaveh's sentimentality has a way of warping the past, but he remembers that when he looked at Alhaitham, Alhaitham would turn and look back almost immediately, as if he could feel the weight of Kaveh's stare on him. It'd delighted him. It was almost like having a vision before he'd had one, a strange, supernatural power: something that could move Alhaitham as visibly and tangibly as the shifting of tectonic plates underneath the earth, a permanent transformation in physical geography.

But they're not who they were when they were younger. So Kaveh doesn't look at Alhaitham, either; he very carefully and purposefully does not look at Alhaitham as he gathers up the pieces that he intends to go home with and brings them with him to the library assistant.

"All of these?" says the librarian, observing Kaveh's collection.

Kaveh makes an affirmative noise; he's whittled it down to a mere fourteen volumes rather than the mountain he'd amassed earlier, selecting only the ones he thinks he'll want to reference when he's working. As she turns to jot down their titles, Kaveh pauses, looking at her record-book.

"Excuse me," he says.

"Hm?"

His knuckles rap lightly against the spines of the books. The ring bounces off of it, scraping some gold off of an embossed title, which Kaveh — hadn't meant to do. His expression falters minutely. "Would you happen to know who's checked these out before?"

"Oh, no," she says. "I'm very sorry."

With a valiant attempt to conceal his confusion, Kaveh says, "But you haven't even looked."

"Well, they haven't been checked out in years," she says, glancing up, and smiles at him apologetically. "If people have read them, they must have done it here, in the House of Daena. These titles aren't very popular nowadays: most students in Kshahrewar prefer the newer editions, which we've just bought more copies of to meet demand. But if you're looking for a research partner, I can file an inquiry on your behalf."

"It's alright," Kaveh says hastily. "I'm not looking for a research partner; I was just wondering."

"If you're sure," she says, and slides the books back to him. "It's no trouble for me, really."

"I'm sure," says Kaveh, and enlists the help of Mehrak again to help him carry them back inside. He intends to ask Alhaitham if he's heading out too, so they can walk back together (no one's liable to see them side-by-side at this hour), but there's a student there, talking to Alhaitham. She's young — very young. It must be her first year at the Akademiya, based on her Haravatat uniform, and her fingers are twisting in her sleeves as she talks. Kaveh can only make out snatches of their conversation with how far away he is. She's stammering.

It isn't that Alhaitham only surrounds himself with geniuses, no matter what snidely-written message board comments seem to imply every once in a while, because Alhaitham appreciates competency, not brilliance, which are not the same thing despite nearly every single figure Kaveh's ever encountered in high academia insisting otherwise. He doesn't hold himself responsible for others' learning, but he's from Sumeru, after all; there's nothing Alhaitham loves more in the world than learning. Kaveh's always known that.

Alhaitham says something back to her inaudibly. He's using the tone of voice he uses when he's explaining something to someone else, his voice patiently measured to the pace of the listener, and Kaveh doesn't want to walk past them and disturb them, so he leans across the pillar nearest to him instead, closing his eyes as he listens. He's lulled to sleep before he realizes it by the sound of Alhaitham's instruction, and then a startled snort from a voice over-familiar, painfully familiar, even down to the way he's caught off-guard: as if he hadn't realized he was laughing until it'd already escaped him.







He's woken up by Alhaitham leaning across his right shoulder from behind him to grab something from the table, the heat of his body stretching over the slope of Kaveh's back. His skin tingles. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Something slips off of Kaveh's left shoulder, leaving him suddenly cold, but Kaveh doesn't turn his head to look, too distracted by Alhaitham's hand brushing next to the ring, which must have slipped off somehow while he slept — he takes it back in hand, giving it a quick once-over, and lets out a breath of relief when he sees it's undamaged. Instead of answering Alhaitham's question, Kaveh says, voice slightly rough with sleep: "Who was that talking to you?"

"I don't know," says Alhaitham. "I didn't ask for her name."

"You didn't even ask her for her name?"

"It wasn't relevant."

"It's rare to see you offer academic advice," says Kaveh suspiciously. "I thought you would have wanted to talk to her for a while longer."

"It's rare to hear worthwhile questions," says Alhaitham. He's holding a book, too, but Kaveh can't make out the title with how his hand's covering it, cupping the spine and fingers splayed out over the curve of the title. It looks oddly familiar. Alhaitham catches him looking, quirks an eyebrow. Kaveh pulls a face back. "And unlike you, my seniority has no bearing on my treatment of others"

"It's just like you to not care about being considerate to your juniors," Kaveh says, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and slots the the ring on his finger again, not wanting to drop it somewhere. He puts the flat of his palm against the table, casting his gaze about before a blue glint distracts him.

"You've scratched these," he says, reaching for the jewels Alhaitham wears around his waist. Alhaitham goes very still. "Why didn't you mention it? You'll need to get these fixed."

"Are you going to ask your junior to do it?"

"What, Shahram? No," Kaveh says, briefly irritated by the implication that he's incapable. He pulls away to scowl at Alhaitham. "I can do it too, you know; we took the same classes on precious stones in Kshahrewar."

"I was under the impression repairs should be done by a professional."

"I am a professional," says Kaveh loudly, narrowing his eyes at Alhaitham. He looks annoyingly pristine, even though the day's stretched on this long; his clothing isn't wrinkled anywhere, the fabric smooth across the shape of his body. He's taken off his cloak, holding it in his other hand, and is readjusting it over his shoulder: it draws Kaveh's attention to his neck, a patch of skin that could be measured by the span of Kaveh's face, tilted, cheek held to the carotid as it thudded against his bones. "And how did I get on this table? Wasn't I over there?"

"You fell asleep on top of it," says Alhaitham, in the tone of one very tolerantly explaining the obvious.

"I know that," says Kaveh, massaging his temples. Now that he's no longer sleeping, his migraine is back again. "You know what, forget it. Where are my books?"

"I can hardly be held responsible for keeping track of their whereabouts if they're your books," Alhaitham points out, but he gestures towards the end of the table anyway. Kaveh gets up, his joints popping, and reaches for them. He gathers them up in his arms and counts; Mehrak must still be holding onto at least half of them. He calls it over to his side when he spots it, blinking himself awake, and Alhaitham waits for him as he pushes his chair into the table and straightens his gloves. The librarian waves at them as they leave.

It's easy to walk with Alhaitham, on a purely practical level. They're both tall enough that Kaveh doesn't have to pay attention to the length of his strides, and even where Kaveh tends to meander, easily distracted by changes in his surroundings, Alhaitham tends to walk slightly slower when he's reading, which evens out their pace. Alhaitham had been even slower, back when they were at the Akademiya, because he'd often grown so absorbed in whatever he was reading that he almost forgot he was walking entirely halfway, leaving Kaveh to wait for him ahead.

You didn't have to wait for me, he'd told Kaveh, once; they'd been walking back to their dorms together when it'd started raining. Kaveh had been in front of Alhaitham, who had stopped walking entirely, entirely engrossed in his book, and he'd stood there and tilted his head back to look at the top of the Akademiya sprawling into the sky as the sky had begun to darken. He'd reached out and grabbed Alhaitham by the sleeve, easy as breathing, and tugged him under the nearest overhang, watching students rush by with their bodies bent over the papers in their hands protectively, and Alhaitham had turned to look at him, his thumb still splayed over the page. He hadn't lost his page.

Kaveh had given him a strange look. They had been about the same height then, Alhaitham steadily creeping up until Kaveh was beginning to forget that he'd started off shorter than him when they started their studies. But back then the newfound height that he'd gained still took Kaveh off-guard, like when he glanced at Alhaitham and saw him so vividly, from angles unrevealed to him before; the texture of his skin, his dark eyelashes, the bold, striking shape of his brows.

Of course I did, he'd said. It was the most obvious thing in the world.

Thinking about Alhaitham always makes Kaveh think about their time in the Akademiya. Tighnari had asked if he didn't think that was a little unhealthy — always being wrapped up in the past — but that's what all of their conversations in the present, now, are underlaid with, and the way that they treat each other. Kaveh doesn't go near Alhaitham's bedroom because he's afraid that Alhaitham won't have the sketch that he'd drawn Alhaitham of his grandmother's house still inside, the one that he'd drawn purely off of instinct and Alhaitham's sparse descriptions when Alhaitham had been homesick and unwilling to say it in their early years, estimating the style based on area and price range and materials Alhaitham'd identified, and Alhaitham still doesn't talk about Kaveh's mother in front of him, not since they'd had that first argument about that, when Kaveh had thought, for the first and only truthful time, that he'd wanted to hit Alhaitham for what he'd said.

Alhaitham still sorts his books in the way that Kaveh taught him. It was something he'd never told anyone: never even mentioned it to Alhaitham, when he'd realized it, first moving in and seeing the books on the shelves, and not Tighnari or Cyno, though they knew the depth of their relationship better than most anyone in Sumeru; he hadn't even written it to himself, unwilling to divulge knowledge — the antithesis of everything he's ever learned — because of the enormity of it, the proof that Kaveh had shaped the structure of Alhaitham's thought, that brilliant mind: hidden in the spines of his well-worn volumes, the mundanity of a genius.

By his side, Alhaitham closes his book; he's finished it. He tucks it underneath his cape, under the arm further away from Kaveh, and surveys the titles in Kaveh's arms with such a blatant lack of self-consciousness that his next words are in no way unexpected: "I thought you were looking for reference materials," he says. "Didn't you cover theoretical analysis of vector calculus in your third year?"

"Yes, but I would have never taken that lecturer's classes if I'd known that I'd have to end up reading the textbooks just to learn what he was supposed to be teaching," declares Kaveh, who has a habit of automatically latching onto age-old points of annoyance. "He told me that all differentiable vector fields could be expressed as the sum of an irrotational and solenoidal vector field, can you believe it? Honestly, I can't believe that the Akademiya hired him, especially with how it goes on and on about the importance of intellect; if it hadn't been the prerequisite for the courses on tensor analysis and hydrodynamics, I'd have petitioned for the Akademiya to cut the course altogether."

There's a little twist to Alhaitham's mouth that suggests he's amused: thinking, maybe, of the many complaints Kaveh had passionately lodged back then. He'd drafted the vast majority of them next to Alhaitham, sounding them out as he paced, and even filed a few of them on Alhaitham's behalf after hearing about some of his courses. "Just that one?"

"Maybe a few more," Kaveh allows, thinking about it — there had been those awful dynamical systems and ergodic theory lessons, and he still had shivers run down his spine whenever he thought about how his phenomenology class was conducted. "But I enjoyed most of my courses at the Akademiya. Especially combinatorics," he adds with sudden enthusiasm, feeling buoyed by the memory as he glances down at the books in his arms. "More Kshahrewar students could benefit from taking combinatorics, especially with how heavily the advisors push for topology as an elective; you took it, too, Alhaitham — didn't you?"

"Only briefly, in Haravatat," says Alhaitham. "One of our final seminars involved a debate component with the purpose of establishing the scope of its definition."

"That's what you wanted my notes for?"

Alhaitham doesn't reply to that even as Kaveh squawks in offense — he'd written practice problems for Alhaitham! He'd thought Alhaitham was going into a practical! — and turns his head away, but not fast enough for Kaveh's heart to not lurch unsteadily in his chest in an emotion that he doesn't care to name when he sees the corner of a smile.

They pass the lower level of the Akademiya, winding their way downwards. There's a student passed out on one of the balconies, slouched on the ground, and Kaveh forces Alhaitham to pause as he unclips his cape and puts it over her, hurrying back to his side once he's done; in anywhere else but the Akademiya, the right thing to do might be to wake her up, but she might be working on dream studies — or her research might be dependent on her staying still and undisturbed — there's no way to tell. It's not a long walk, but it feels like it is. Kaveh wonders if it's too late to tack on the thought that he hadn't finished earlier, the thing he'd forgotten to say: that the mathematics books weren't for reference. He'd just wanted to read them again.

He doesn't say it, in the end, and Alhaitham doesn't ask again. Moonlight draws a line perpendicular to Alhaitham's nose from where it slips through the slats of someone's half-finished roof. Kaveh twists the ring on his finger again. They pass various sights: the benches on the street, the lights fashioned above their head, the last of the night-market merchants packing up their stalls, now that there are no more students milling about to buy their wares. He draws his fingers over the railings, examines the shapes of the balustrade. Looking into one of the arched windows of the Akademiya as they draw close, he nearly expects to see his younger self peering back.

Half to himself, Kaveh says, "Sometimes I think I miss this more than anything else in the world."

Beside him, then behind him, Alhaitham's footsteps slow. Kaveh turns around to look at him. He's stopped entirely, just standing there.

That stare is unfathomable. Alhaitham says, "No, you don't."

And Kaveh, after a beat of silence: "Yes, I suppose I don't," because places are also things you outgrow — like beds that are too short for you once you hit your growth spirit, and doorways that Alhaitham once only filled half of that he now has to duck through, and bookshelves that you once thought you'd never read all of that your own works now stare back at you from. No matter how richly the stained glass of the Akademiya is colored, Kaveh's reflection's drawn expression and dark circles and budding wrinkles whenever he furrows his brows don't disappear.

At least Alhaitham grew up, in a manner of speaking, and made friends and got a house and advanced a societally-respected career, and is even more unreadable in a natural progression of himself and how he used to be, whereas Kaveh is worse and produces less and more mediocre work as the years go by, all the while being less charming and smart and witty than he's ever been, no matter how much Alhaitham contends that smart is the most useless quality in the world by being impossible to quantify unlike retention or speed at solving sums. He's downwards sliding into turning younger, less capable, when all he'd thought he'd be when he was older was more of himself; it's a strange feeling, really, like climbing the stairs up and up and up, and seeing a beautiful building in the distance, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, and then you look down and you realize you've been going down the whole time, and the dream that you'd thought you'd reach soon years ago is still as far away as it's ever been.

When he was very little, one of the first things his mother had told him was this: an architect looks at an empty space and sees how to fill it. But what did you do when the space couldn't be filled — when all it did was grow emptier?










The entrance swings open easily under the persuasion of Alhaitham's key. Mehrak flies in first, ducking into Kaveh's bedroom, while his owner trails behind, taking off his shoes and putting them away in the closet one-handedly. He has to juggle the books from hand to hand to keep his balance. Alhaitham goes the other way: enters his room without looking back, leaving Kaveh to lock the front door.

So he locks the front door. The books go on the daybed, the ring gingerly set atop them, and Kaveh unclips his hair, letting it fall around his shoulders. His blueprint is on one of the seats: there in the spot that Alhaitham usually sits, the one that his female client had rejected, and he reaches for it, passing the tube back and forth over the length of his fingers.

He should put it away, he thinks.

There's a cabinet that Kaveh keeps all of his past work in. It's divided into two sections: one about three-quarters of the length of the cabinet, and the other the remaining quarter; there in the former he stores the projects that have never passed approval but are too complete for him to discard in good conscience, a reflection of the work that he's made that'll never reach fruition. None of them can be reused. Each of his designs is specifically made to the customer's specifications: just by looking at them, he can reason out the original requests, the budget they'd come to him with, where the design was supposed to have been built.

The sheer amount of them is staggering, now that he's looking at them properly, the cabinet door hanging open. He'd wanted to throw some of them away, but then he'd thought about how he'd regret it — the way he always does — after some time had passed. So Kaveh keeps them all, once they've reached a certain point of the process, and puts them here. There must be dozens of them now, well over a hundred; this one, too, is just one of their many.

There's an odd sort of affection that he harbors for them: all of them, even the ones that he doesn't think are good — even the ones that objectively aren't. He made them, after all; isn't it natural for him to like them? They still have qualities that draw Kaveh's eye and make him look twice, because of course they do: he'd drawn them, after all, and all that he makes is all he loves.

But they're not good, really, when you just look at them without all the sentiment. They're painfully ordinary, the type of assignment that would have gotten him in trouble had he turned it in for one of his assignments; No thought put behind it at all, one of his professors would say, rolling her eyes. And how do you expect to make a living off of work like this? The buildings that he creates a real, tangible, visual-physical representation of how he carves out his own capability, a real, tangible, visual-physical representation of how he carves away at it. The genius that Kaveh is meant to possess is gnawed thin like marrow sucked off the bone.

He can see it all: pulling them open, laying them out in front of him, he can see it all. The places that he could have made them better, and how they could be better, and how he'd ignored that in favor of the clients' insistence. Too many of the drafts here were better than their finalized versions, the structures that he'd materialized failing to live up to what they'd been before.

Kaveh isn't ashamed of his work — he isn't. But he know he's failed it, immeasurably, in the worst way a Sumerian scholar can. Everything he creates is a consciously defanged version of his own potential.

The cabinet clicks shut softly. Kaveh puts his hand to his head, taking a breath, and listens to the sound of rushing water. Alhaitham must have drawn a bath. The cushion of his chair gives slightly as Kaveh sits down on it, feeling very frayed, and he pulls his legs up, his knees close to his chest. He looks out the window, and keeps looking out it still, even as Alhaitham comes out of the bathroom dripping water from the ends of his hair, which Kaveh would normally nag him for: sits there, thinking nothing at all and saying nothing at all as Alhaitham plip-plops damply into his own room and shortly thereafter emerges marginally dryer, a book in hand, and takes the seat adjacent to Kaveh on the daybed. He starts to read, which Kaveh sees out of the corner of his eye.

They don't say anything for a while. Kaveh leans his head back, staring at the ceiling, and thinks of his mother, who had left for Fontaine, and all of the buildings she'd designed that she was so proud of and taught to him so carefully.

He'd never resented her for leaving him. Alhaitham had said, that one time — but no, he'd never resented her. He'd known that she loved it: her work, her own architectural legacy rooted firmly in Sumeru, and he'd left that, too, when she'd gone, so it wasn't just Kaveh that she was abandoning in Sumeru, and it wasn't because she didn't love him, because she was leaving other things that she loved, too.

It was only that when his bangs got too long when he was a child, he'd brushed them to the side with one hand, letting it swoop over the crown of his head, and that would make her eyes go dark and wide and pained, and the next day she'd ask him to sit still while she cut his hair. And there was the time she'd visited him in the Akademiya, where he had grown out his hair to the length he keeps it at now, but he hadn't styled it, too busy to put it into clips during their assessment period, and so he'd just let it fall from one side to another, and she'd said hello when she'd seen him, her arms by her sides, and asked him about his studies, and he'd been nearly too distracted to notice how her expression had so visibly sad, and surprised by it, too, like she hadn't expected him to hurt her. She hadn't visited him after that — only written, once in a while.

( Do you think I should cut my hair? he'd asked Alhaitham, after, toying with the ends as he looked at that mirror he'd made. Alhaitham hadn't looked up.

You like it long, he'd said. It wasn't a yes or no answer. )

He gets up, intending to do… he'll go to his room, and get Mehrak, and figure it out afterwards. But a warm hand closes around the side of his arm, closer to his elbow than the expanse of his palm, and pulls him closer to Alhaitham, next to the daybed, and Kaveh turns and looks at him.

"I have to do something," says Kaveh. It's softer than a whisper.

"Kaveh," says Alhaitham.

It's all he needs to say.

Kaveh closes his eyes. He lets Alhaitham guide him next to him, on the daybed, and take his bare wrist in hand, turning it so the soft, pale underside is pointing upwards. Alhaitham holds it there, cupped between two hands, and presses his thumbs into the skin there in circles. He thinks about the last time they'd done this, and how he'd been the one to teach Alhaitham how to massage this way, in shapes, when he'd pressed down on his back… the way that he'd confessed to Alhaitham that he loved architecture when he'd been drunk as students, face red and aglow… Alhaitham's voice, cold and sharp, saying love isn't enough to live on, Kaveh, when they'd fought.

He wants to ask why Alhaitham's doing this, but he doesn't want to hear the answer.

It doesn't matter. There's no going back. Even the way that Alhaitham touches him is different, ghosting over his skin, though it shouldn't feel different, isn't different in a way that he can describe, with evidence, the way that he should be able to; that's how palpable it is. Nothing is changed — nothing new is realized. What he is he's always been, even if he's less of it; even if he feels more of it.

Kaveh loves the things that can't forgive him, because that's at least a love he can understand.








In the morning Kaveh draws a bath and washes, having written a letter to Tighnari about what he thought Kaveh should do with the ring Shahram gave him, and he's replied to Cyno's invitation, too. His hair is still curling damply around his nape as he wanders into the kitchen, where Alhaitham is reading again, still wearing his sleep clothes. Alhaitham looks up as he approaches, unaffected as always, as Kaveh takes another sunsettia from the fruit plate, running it under the water. Droplets drip down and over the swallow's bone of his wrist.

He feels oddly resolved today, stronger, which isn't so strange, really; Kaveh's moods strike him now and then, and there's no knowing what way they'll turn.

"Aren't you going to forgetting to move that?" Alhaitham says, finally bothering to address him at long last, and he looks over at their living room, where Kaveh's project, the one that he had brought all that wood for, still stands. He'd left it there after attending to the shelves the other day. Kaveh looks up mid-bite.

"I cleaned up the wood shavings this morning!"he says defensively, forcing himself to swallow first and then regretting it when his throat protests. "And it's decorative. It's much more pleasing to the eye than what you've been bringing home, and it actually matches the colors —I don't know why you keep on bringing cool-toned metals in, I've told you a thousand times that everything in here is warm-toned — not to mention its utility!"

"It looks like a book stand," says Alhaitham.

"it is a book stand!"

"We don't need another book stand," Alhaitham says flatly. "We have seven."

"It's different, obviously — I managed to bring back wood sensitive to elemental energy on my trip to the forest, the same kind that they use in the Akademiya, you remember, and I've designed it so that it'll turn pages without requiring any physical touch once you release some Dendro energy, the way some branches and vines attuned to the elements will expand and grow when there's an elemental reaction. Since the wood's already been cut, the growth will be artificial — it'll retract after the initial movement, but that's enough for it to turn a page."

"Considering the size of the texts that you normally reference when working," Alhaitham says after a moment. "It seems impractical. Are you certain they'll fit on that frame?"

And Kaveh's books are, in fact, large. He has to buy them directly, rather than relying on vendors, and the process of acquiring them is difficult even in Sumeru because they're usually only directly sold to educational institutions like the Akademiya; he borrows books from the House of Daena, but those are supplemental, text-based materials, whereas what Kaveh has at home are illustrations: made larger to convey the necessary details and magnify the minutiae of architecture.

No matter how adjustable he's made it — and he has made it adjustable, so that it can be moved to the desired height, and he's added detachable wheels to the base, so it can be moved with ease — the stand can't be made wider unless he adds additional panels, and even if he did it'd throw off the balance of the piece. But none of that matters.

Kaveh says, baffled, "Well, yes; I can't use it. I need everything to be laid flat on my worktable so I can see it as I sketch."

For a while Alhaitham is silent, and it's not until it continues to creep on that Kaveh looks up above the pit of his sunsettia, looking over at him. Alhaitham's eyes meet his.

"Weren't you concerned about not making anything of value?" says Alhaitham.

And Kaveh says, "Of course you only think it's something of value when it's something that makes your life easier," but he can't hide the startled pleasure in his voice, especially as Alhaitham pushes himself off the counter and draws closer to the stand, running his fingers over the surface that Kaveh had carved grooves into, so any book would be guaranteed to have enough traction that they wouldn't be in danger of sliding, and then sanded. Those deft, dextrous hands of Alhaitham's are bare, stripped of their gloves. He's quiet for a while.

"You don't have any meetings today?"

"No, my schedule's clear," says Kaveh, and he throws away the pit of his sunsettia with a vengeance. "And my designs aren't due until weeks later, especially since they want so many revisions. But I'm not going to work on them today," he says sharply, and then, like he's trying to convince himself, "I'm not! Today, I'm only going to work on things that I want to work on, and nothing else. I'm not even going to think about my revisions."

If Alhaitham says something in response, Kaveh doesn't hear it. He's already down the hallway, pushing a door open, and instructing Mehrak to help him bring his worktable closer to the front room, pushing against it with all of his weight. By the time he manages to bring it to the living room, Alhaitham's back in the kitchen, peeling a sunsettia with a paring knife; he looks up when Kaveh leans against the worktable, huffing for breath and red-faced.

"I thought you were doing what you wanted today," says Alhaitham, and splits the sunsettia into half with a press of the knife. His fingers glisten with juice.

"What, are you telling me to leave?" Kaveh demands, out of breath.

"No," says Alhaitham, and frustratingly does not elaborate on that. "What are you doing?"

"What do you think?" says Kaveh. He bundles his hand in his palm and slips a pin through, affixing it to the top of his head: flicks the overhead lamp on, something he'd made for them so they wouldn't strain their eyes with the blue-green-gold of their windows. He's been meaning to replace it; the design isn't quite as polished as he'd like. He'd put together its design over there, in the kitchen, after one of their arguments when he'd first moved in, and over the years it's fallen into the category of projects Kaveh means to pick up but never has.

One of his professors had asked him, once, when he was almost done with his studies: After your graduation, have you ever thought about what you're going to do with the rest of your life?

He'd thought about it. In the desert with Anis and Daya, his wrist sending sharp, jagged pain up his arm, he'd thought about it: what he would do if he had been the one in their position, nearly trapped in the ruins forever, for the rest of his life, without knowing what or when death would come, removed from all the responsibilities and parts of his identity that he'd thought were essential to him. No Akademiya, no Kshahrewar: just Kaveh.

He'd thought about it in practicalities first. It wasn't dark: there was still mysterious light inside of the ruins, a brilliance that made it impossible to distinguish between night and day. He would still have his things on him, his pen, his paper, a paltry amount of supplies.

Just him.

Kaveh, his mother had said. She'd kissed his browbone. I know you'll be a great architect.

"I'm going to draw," says Kaveh, plain as anything: a perfect of-course.

author's notes

the thought i had most during writing this fic was "god this reads like i only read fanfiction". which is not true, but might as well be at the rate i'm failing to read real novels. i am genuinely illiterate.

i wrote most of it in one go, and then the ending scenes separately, in chronological order, after reading my beloved mutual's haikaveh fic, which immediately sent me on an inspired haikaveh bender. i don't even like haikaveh that much; my favorite member of their 4ggravate quartet is cyno. i was worried about capturing their voices and mannerisms throughout the fic, but overall i think it turned out decently, at least for me, especially since i didn't even manage to play the recent genshin event.

generally, i'm okay with what i wrote. i do think the ending is the weakest part, and far too rushed, but i was running out of steam and it's much better than i initially thought it was after letting it marinate a little bit before rereading, even though it has an insane amount of basic errors (i fixed about eight on my own just taking out lines to commentate on for this). the prose and general concepts do seem a bit juvenile to me, but i like it; i'm fine with it. and most of all, i'm pleased beyond belief that niz liked it.

As he is now, it just makes him look like a particularly haggard fungi, or so Tighnari's told him,

this is an oblique reference to a_kaeyada's hoyofair animatic called "the diagnosis".

although the smudged fingerprint on the window nearest to the doorway where Alhaitham must have leaned his weight against as he bent down to retrieve something or the other does,

foreshadowing for the last part of the fic, and also an allusion to one of the reasons why kaveh continually makes things that make alhaitham's life easier (the page-turner, the shoe rack, etc.); because it bothers him, and also he's in love with alhaitham. there's also more foreshadowing scattered throughout the length of the fic, like when he thinks about hiding with alhaitham from the rain, and noticing that alhaitham hadn't lost his page (though i intend to rewrite that part because of how repetitive it is).

which he'd had to build by hand, cutting the glass painstakingly and fitting it into the frames until he was satisfied with the view he'd constructed of himself

starting off the fic, i was like, i need to cut some of these damn sentences. but i really wanted to keep this part in the end because i feel like it sets up the tone of the fic, that is, kaveh reflecting about the shape of himself, how he sees himself, the image that he's constructed of himself in his head… etc…

Kaveh had only come back from a business trip two days ago, his luggage filled with wood samples and haphazardly scrawled notes, and he'd spent the first day sleeping, dead to the world, and the second day he'd jolted awake with such alarm that Alhaitham had dropped something in his room — audibly — when Kaveh had sprung to his feet loudly and dragged himself to his workbench, worked into a fit of sudden panic at the looming deadline of one of his other projects, and he'd worked on that design until his fingers were smudged with lines that'd fallen on his palms instead of the paper he'd meant it to. And then, conceding defeat at last, and only reluctantly satisfied with the result of his efforts, he'd gone and unpacked all of his luggage, dropping massive pieces of wood into their living room, and gone for his tools to distract himself.

reference to alhaitham's voiceline, where he says: i hope my roommate won't be hammering away on another one of his projects in the dead of night... actually, i'd prefer if he wasn't home at all. i really don't want to wear my soundproof earpieces to bed...

He's particularly fond of pointing out that just "taking his chances" is not something that he'd expect Kaveh to find advisable, considering his well-known streak of bad luck in most everything else.

reference to alhaitham's commentary on kaveh's lot-drawing in the parade of providence event incorporated into their other arguments here.

Not dreaming, only — I could do this in my sleep, his classmates at the Akademiya had complained, reviewing the work of their juniors in the underclassmen's hallway; Kaveh, peering into the open door of the woodshop, had thought: I really, really could.

i think this is one of my favorite parts of the fic, and establishes what i want to be clear in kaveh's assessment of himself the most in my characterization of him; that though he is an unreliable narrator, he does have an accurate grasp on himself and his capabilities — even to the point of him seeming arrogant when he thinks about it ("I really could do this in my sleep") and that's why it frustrates him so much to be creating mediocre work: because he knows, rooted in an objective view of himself, that he is "better" than this.

He takes another sip from his drink, casual as anything, and flips to the next part of his book, frowning slightly; he has to readjust his hold on it as he thumbs over the page, the liquid in the cup nearly spilling all over the floor. He could just set it down — Kaveh's told him as much before — but Alhaitham is not to be deterred.

just exposition to set up the need for the pageturner, again; you'll notice in some respects alhaitham and kaveh don't change, despite the other one encouraging them to... something about their mirrored stubbornness when it comes to preserving some parts of themselves.

"Not going to eat else anything before you go?" Alhaitham says, pointedly conciliatory, like he doesn't know that Kaveh doesn't have the time to eat something before he goes, or at least not now: all because of Alhaitham's urging, might he add! If he hadn't had to point out the mess in their living room, Kaveh might have had been able to grab more than a sunsettia before he had to go to work.

alhaitham is genuinely concerned. kaveh is just a hater

The waiter observes them both warily from behind the counter. Kaveh's nails dig into his palms.

this was supposed to be a commentary on kaveh's general unwillingness to inconvenience other people v. his unwillingness to compromise his art. the damage to kaveh's hands specifically is very intentional; it's supposed to represent the site of his artistic genius, as he commentates later, as he uses his hands to draw his blueprints.

isn't it lovely?Assembling the foundation like cutting up a fruit: revealing the soft flesh of it as to be made palatable, then digested, and awaiting the pleasure of the tongue, the sweetest thing words can say, likening mind to mind: it's lovely.

this is a flowery depiction of final exchange between kaveh and alhaitham — kaveh hoping alhaitham will like it, that he will also find it beautiful in the way kaveh does, and alhaitham referencing kaveh's desire to make something meaningful -> this is something meaningful he's created -> kaveh feeling shocked, pleased, etc… fulfilled… AND HE CAN GO ON BELIEVING…

found him difficult to love, or at least difficult for her, though she would have never admitted it, which doesn't make it less of the truth: Kaveh is intimately acquainted with how lack of admission doesn't preclude the possibility of honesty.

this is also supposed to be a subtle reference to kaveh's rship with alhaitham giving him the "intimate" familiarity with how a lack of admission =/= precluding the possibility of honesty… and also familiarity with relationships where the kaveh is difficult to love even by those who love him

Isn't it embarrassing to define yourself by how gifted you'd been when you were in the Akademiya when we've graduated for over a decade? Alhaitham had asked a peer once coolly when they'd bumped into him over drinks, after they'd been talking about their school years — or rather, the other man was talking about his school years, and how he'd had better grades in Kaveh in their foundational courses when they were students. He'd kicked Alhaitham under the table, but it's something that haunts him: does Kaveh, as he is now, have anything to be proud of, to admire that he's striving towards?

extremely comedic moment TO ME; alhaitham rises up to defend his boyfriend's honor and kaveh is like alhaitham omfg what is wrong with you without realizing it, and then develops a mental crisis over what alhaitham said to defend him. i do think though it's not just alhaitham defending kaveh here but also his genuine curiosity of like… damn bro… you're okay with admitting you peaked in high school?

the red flesh of Alhaitham's eyes, that outer corner that traced the edge of his bottom lashes.

not in a perverted way (maybe in a perverted way) but i think kaveh would be particularly drawn to the edge of alhaitham's eyes, near the waterline, because i think kaveh would be drawn to the idea of alhaitham crying or expressing any sort of strong emotion because of him…um…. guy who needs emotional validation or he'll die

his arm supported at the elbow by something else soft and warm.

it's alhaitham's hand propping him up.

But Alhaitham's silences have a sound to them that Kaveh knows, even if Alhaitham doesn't know what they sound like

originally the line was something like "but alhaitham's silences have a sound to them kaveh knows, even if alhaitham himself can't parse what they sound like because he literally can't hear them, and also only employs them when he doesn't want to say something, as if they're an absence of communication, when they're a sound in of themselves [to kaveh]" in my drafts when i was outlining this.

A lack of structural integrity; that's what Kaveh has.

also a pun, as it's supposed to communicate kaveh's lack of integrity and also the idea that alhaitham is his fatal flaw that leads him to structural failure as in he's his weak point, etc.; that he's not built soundly, and completely, but rather only looks stable from the outside looking in, rather than inherently and foundationally being stable.

He'd eaten a quarter of it reluctantly, and then tucked away the rest of it away in Mehrak, stomach turning at the idea of eating more. He didn't normally eat breakfast.

which is why alhaitham pointing out the fact to kaveh hadn't necessarily been a quip about how kaveh was running too late now to eat but alhaitham rather responding to the pattern of kaveh failing to eat breakfast… out of concern

It's like he can see Alhaitham in that uniform again, green cap and all, caught in something he hadn't intended to do, debated into a corner that he couldn't back out of, startled and irritated and faintly dissatisfied, the corner of his expression pulled together as he realized what he'd said had implicated himself more than anyone else.

i think most romantic idea ever is kaveh and haitham arguing in the akademiya, engaging in academic debate for no other reason than to pick at the other's brain. one of my favorite parts to write was the part where kaveh and alhaitham are leaving the house of daena and talking about their academic lives in slightly more detail. this is also a reference to the common theme in this fic, which is that kaveh and alhaitham's arguments in this are meant to be more revealing than they intend them to, in which they reveal that their arguments implicate themselves and their care for the other more than anything else.

You keep on surrounding yourself with people that take what you can't afford, said ten times, or at least a hundred, closer to a thousand than not.

I'm giving it, thinks Kaveh: the fundamental difference, defined.

kaveh's ideological vindication from making alhaitham take litr. the breakfast he couldn't afford to get himself. 9000iq move kaveh masterfully done

This is what I love, it says, the swoop of an archway in the shadow of a curve of a too-familiar throat shaded in gray, that delicate junction between one part of the body to the other that was door and passageway too. This is what I find beautiful, the shape of my desire.

um perverted parallel drawn between alhaitham's body and the arch of a building as things that kaveh loves and sees in each other. i tried to emphasize that more than thinking of alhaitham's body as a building, kaveh sees it as more of a passageway; that is, it brings him to and evokes things that he loves, which is alhaitham and his mind and everything else about him, and also that, of course, the sight of alhaitham reminds him of his love for alhaitham, which would be unbearable if he hadn't been bearing it for so long already.

he says to himself, keenly reproachful, and then, correcting himself automatically, like a proper Akademiya graduate: "I shouldn't have expected."

um at some point in this fic kaveh mentions that he doesn't append the same importance to correctness as alhaitham does to his phrasing, which is not generally true — a lot of the fic has stuff like 'generally speaking" or "usually" or "it's [adjective], or at least [clarified version of adjective]", which is supposed to illustrate 1) kaveh's unreliable narrator-isms and 2) kaveh's [ALBEDO/MONA/ETC. VOICE] SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH… which is that he tries to be able to portray things as closely/correctly to his vision as he sees them… that truthfulness of vision, which kaveh instinctually desires < wow that was such a good line i feel like i should edit it in or something

Even by then, he'd known had the warmth of these walls could transfigure the sight of things.

just the general idea of the light inside creating false images is supposed to relate to kaveh's relationship with himself and how he thinks that others see him… the idea that warmth/kindness can transfigure other people's perceptions of him (or other objects, in this case the tiles being an extension of himself) and make them appear different — in his case, better, kinder, more selfless, etc. — instead of as they truly are

Daya and Anis

actual sumeru npcs. the whole story with them references kaveh's vision story, where it talks about how he used to go into the desert all the time as a student to study ruins, and then once he saved two students from being trapped in the ruins forever by tackling them with his body and getting out with only minor injuries, but they saw it as a difference in abilities and decided to quit the project, but they aren't actually named in his vision story; i just decided to pretend they were the same people as these two npcs. sorry for slandering you, daya and anis.

a hidden story about this section is that originally i was going to work in somehow that alhaitham was the one who helped kaveh take notes when his wrist was sprained but they kept on arguing because alhaitham's sketches/diagrams etc. weren't accurate to what kaveh was trying to illustrate. this was supposed to represent how kaveh tries to help others even at the detriment of what he loves most (in this case, he sacrifices the use of his wrist, which is vital for sketching/writing/etc. especially since he studies architecture, in order to save their lives.)

"I should have fought for it," Kaveh says.

he's spurred on by the flashback to anis/daya because they believe he was better than them/more capable than them, so he feels like he should have fought for the original design with the client because he does, objectively, know more than her/knows better than her wrt it; in not doing so, he sees it as a sort of betrayal in their belief/expectation of him, because if the world that he sees is so different from them that they gave up on their research because of it, shouldn't he take responsibility for it, too, as the one who'd caused it, and live up to their expectations?

which was surprisingly not about the mortifying crisis he'd had over one of his projects but the conversation they'd had when Kaveh was walking back from Pardis Dhyai,

this is an added scene to the ending of kaveh's hangout quest where he hangs out with the rest of 4ggravate in pardis dhyai to celebrate collei's studies. the part about the books being moved and alhaitham telling him this is a reference to another route in kaveh's hangout, where alhaitham informs him of the same thing.

uncomfortable understanding that even the faces that smiled at him politely were talking behind his back about how he was a half-orphan with a dead desert-deserted father

another reference to kaveh's hangout where he talks about being isolated/judged in akademiya because of his dead father, though he is generally a popular figure within the akademiya.

"You couldn't wake me up earlier?!" as he's tugging his shirt off, stumbling off of the bed with an extreme lack of grace as Alhaitham lifts his cup to his mouth while he (purposefully!) does not look at Kaveh's expression of abject betrayal as he throws open his closet

alhaitham is (not?) looking at kaveh pervertedly, which is why he is not looking at kaveh's face.

Alhaitham left, strangely enough, at the threshold of his bedroom, blandly observing the pieces of clothing Kaveh's left strewn on his floor. Alhaitham's holding a book, but for once he's not looking at it. His eyes are resting on something that Kaveh can't see.

um… also perverted. but also a commentary on how their perspectives and outlooks on the world can be so radically different, even if the context of their knowledge (in this case, the house that they share) is the same.

"Oh, I know," the man says, and he does smile, and his tone is genial and perfectly friendly. "I just heard that you were always early."

the whole point of this was (alhaitham vc) kaveh keeps on doing things he doesn't have to for other people and that makes them take it and him for granted

a new scar across his outside forearm that hadn't been there when they were studying in Kshahrewar together.

kaveh (my version of kaveh) also has a scar on his forearm, which is supposed to be a commonality they share because of their backgrounds, working with ancient technology, their hands, etc. in the past/present. you'll notice that shahram's is on the outside of his arm, where it's a superficial wound, whereas kaveh's is on the inside of his arm, bisecting a vein, because it's supposed to represent like, guy who has normal, healthy relationships with the pain of his work versus whatever the hell kaveh has going on.

"Really?" says Shahram, and then he laughs. "I guess that's because no one could see you anywhere else but Kshahrewar."

Kaveh laughs too, even more awkwardly[...]

(kaveh vc) theres no way thats fucking true but i cant say it… (it is true)

But: "Not very," says Kaveh, and it doesn't cost him anything at all to say.

but it very obviously does kaveh things to say because he's litr. pushing other things that he needs to do in his life out of the way to make someone's life easier even though he barely knows this guy. but kaveh is like (unironically) wow, that was so easy and unstressful and generally just a fun and great thing to say, which did not give me emotional turmoil unlike my several crises over my art

Kaveh bought his juniors meals all the time when they bumped into each other and they started talking about the Palace of Alcazarzaray and how much they'd loved it and how they were just sure Kaveh was reaping the well-deserved rewards of his genius.

imagine kaveh looking this close to killing himself as his juniors rave about how much they love him and how great he is over lunch, and since they expect him to be rolling in money after completing such an incredible project he HAS to take them to a nice place, obviously, and he buys the cheapest thing off the menu because it's impolite to just sit there and watch them eat, and he tells them to order freely even though he has no money to pay for their meal

he's chosen one of the shirts that he'd stretched out drying it by accident so it slips off his shoulders from where he'd hung it to expose more of his gaunt shoulders than is strictly necessary, and makes him look like he has very puffy shoulder joints from the shape of the excess fabric.

i was afraid people would be like ohhh exposed shoulder exposed collarbone thats sooo sexy but i tried to communicate that it is not very sexy when done in this specific way, but also to show kaveh's vanity and how much he does put into making himself look beautiful on a normal basis.

"You never come here on your lunch break," Kaveh says accusatorily, cracking an eye open. "You keep on saying there's too many people and that they all try to haggle and everyone stops you every ten steps you take. And the smell of the food stalls clings to your clothes, which you hate, especially since paper picks up scent so well."

alhaitham's correct here; he has never said it, and it doesn't matter, because kaveh's heard it all anyway. i think these would all be things kaveh loves: the people, the people talking to him, the hustle and bustle, the smells of the food stalls, etc.

It's the same look that Alhaitham always gives Kaveh, the way that he looks at him all the time; there's nothing special about it at all.

AND IT'S UNBEARABLE… kaveh acknowledges, here, in this context, that it's unbearable.

"Nor are they always illogical," says Alhaitham, and no more.

this is also a euphemism for themselves, of course; their rship/dynamic/what's going on with them at the moment

He slips it on the index finger of his right hand, not really wanting to wear it but not wanting to put it in Mehrak, either, on account of how the stone might get damaged from rolling around in it unprotected. There's nothing to keep scratches from forming on its pristine multifaceted surface, and the stone has such a vibrant luster that the idea of damaging it intentionally makes Kaveh's throat squirm uncomfortably.

kaveh thinks of placing the ring in mehrak and it happening to get scratched because he wasn't given something to carry it in as him intentionally damaging the stone… which is on some level true but >something something assigning blame to yourself<

"The other day in Pardis Dhyai; I might as well review them, now that I'm here: there's some great material in those books, you know," he says meaningfully, putting an emphasis on the last part.

his annotations ARE useful ALHAITHAM. i think it's also easier for kaveh to admit that there's value in his work when he can also talk about its sources or external figures having inherent value; that is, the bridge of port ormos is beautiful also because port ormos is beautiful, the annotations are valuable because the books themselves are valuable, etc.

Kaveh always ends up buying something that he also can't afford, and then there's painting, and music, where he hasn't picked up his dutar in ages, even though he always means to.

kaveh has a line somewhere about how he plays an instrument, but he doesn't say what it is. kaveh and alhaitham's house has a dutar, and so does lambad's tavern, i think; this is a nod to both of those things.

There's a chill that sets itself over the surface of his skin, so he puts his hand over his forearm and keeps it there, watching the crooked shape of his vein pulse into his palm, where there's a faint, pale scar bisecting his length from when he'd gotten injured on a solo trip to some desert ruins.

loose reference? to kaveh and the way he deals with harm to himself, his masochistic tendencies etc. in the wider context of the conversation happening around him wrt the palace of alcazarzaray. you'll also notice that kaveh's trip here is a "solo trip" as opposed to the group trip he'd done with the two girls before.

By the time he's done, the House of Daena is significantly emptier. Only a few students are left: at least half of them are from his darshan, Kaveh thinks, glowing with pride at first before he grows rapidly concerned about the state of Kshahrewar if so many students are staying back this late when it's not even exam season.

it's because he's there. they're staying back to look at him, specifically, as the light of kshahrewar.

His knuckles rap lightly against the spines of the books. The ring bounces off of it, scraping some gold off of an embossed title, which Kaveh — hadn't meant to do. His expression falters minutely. "Would you happen to know who's checked these out before?"

i'm not sure if it's too obvious, but the person who's been reading his annotations and reviewing the contents of kaveh's mind is alhaitham. you'll notice that later kaveh notices him holding a book he thinks looks familiar, but alhaitham's covering the title: it's one of the ones that kaveh just looked at, earlier, that he wrote tons in.

He's woken up by Alhaitham learning across his right shoulder from behind him to grab something from the table, the heat of his body stretching over the slope of Kaveh's back.

alhaitham had put his cloak over kaveh in the library. you can catch a few hints about it if you read the section carefully; how alhaitham's holding it, how kaveh suddenly feels cold, and how alhaitham has to put it on later, before they go out.

the proof that Kaveh had shaped the structure of Alhaitham's thought, that brilliant mind: hidden in the spines of his well-worn volumes, the mundanity of a genius.

what's more romantic than thinking about someone? shaping the structure of their thought itself.

Kaveh loves the things that can't forgive him, because that's at least a love he can understand.

the first line of the fic i wrote, after reading niz's fic, because it was what i was thinking of, when i thought of hkvh, and ultimately what inspired me to write this one after all. the second part i wrote, out of order, is the part about the sky as a ceiling, and the rest was all in chronological order.

"No," says Alhaitham, and frustratingly does not elaborate on that. "What are you doing?"

this is the final affirmation: that kaveh, who has sworn to do nothing except what he wants, wants to be around alhaitham, in their home, around him and his company.

miscellaneous

> title

one over represents a couple of things; it's a pretty punny title. the first thing is that one over represents the reciprocal, in mathematics, where you take one over a number — and the mathematics/stem focus represents both kaveh and also the main theme of the fic which is reciprocity (i.e. kaveh loves the things that can't forgive him — like alhaitham, or his mom, or architecture, unreciprocated love etc.). there's a couple more reasons i chose it, but some of them are a stretch, and some of them are just me thinking im funny.

the other title was objective love, which is of course a reference to how kaveh objectively loves things (alhaitham, his mom, architecture), but also how he expresses his love through objects (object-ive love), like building that pageturner for alhaitham or any of his described furniture renovations.

> secrets

you'll notice that alhaitham never interrupts kaveh in this fic, although many other characters do.

on rewrites

i do plan on rewriting and adding a few sections for it to flow better, just... not right now. but i do intend to get back to it.